History
Origin
Cloud Custodian was created in 2016 inside Capital One by Kapil Thangavelu. The bank was moving onto public cloud and had accumulated a sprawl of ad hoc scripts for tagging, cleanup, and compliance checks. The goal was to fold those scripts into a single lightweight and flexible tool with consistent metrics and reporting (CNCF blog, 2022-09-14). The GitHub repository was created on 2016-03-01 (GitHub REST API).
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2016 | Created at Capital One by Kapil Thangavelu; repository opened 2016-03-01 |
| 2020 | Accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 2020-06-25, contributed by Capital One |
| 2022 | Promoted to CNCF Incubating on 2022-09-14 by TOC vote |
| 2026 | Release line 0.9.51 (0.9.51.0 published 2026-05-28) |
How it evolved
The tool began as AWS-only and grew into a multi-cloud engine. Provider support for Azure, GCP, and others lives in separate packages under tools/ rather than in the core, so the c7n core stays cloud-agnostic and each provider ships on its own. The same pattern produced satellite tools: c7n_mailer for notifications, c7n_org for multi-account runs, and c7n_left for scanning infrastructure as code before it is applied (README.md).
Governance moved from a single company to a community model. The project splits work into functional areas (the AWS, GCP, Azure, Tencent, and Oracle providers, c7n-org, notifications, docs, and releases), each with area maintainers tracked in OWNERS.md and CODEOWNERS, while core maintainers handle cross-area decisions and CNCF liaison (GOVERNANCE.md).
At the time of incubation the project reported 350+ contributors, 130+ contributing organisations, 4.3K GitHub stars, and over 150M downloads (CNCF blog, 2022-09-14).
Where it stands now
Cloud Custodian remains a CNCF Incubating project (CNCF project page). It is packaged on PyPI as c7n with the provider tools published as companion modules, and a container image is published as cloudcustodian/c7n on Docker Hub (PyPI, Docker Hub). As observed on 2026-06-24 the repository carried 6,014 stars, 1,625 forks, and roughly 418 contributors, on the 0.9.51 release line (GitHub REST API).