Adoption & Ecosystem

Who uses it

The repository has no ADOPTERS.md file, and no verifiable production-adopter source was found, so this deep-dive does not list named production adopters. Inventing them would be worse than saying so.

The README does name companies, but as the affiliations of contributors, not as production references: it credits "30+ contributors from Tencent, intel, ByteDance, Ant Group, Kanzhun, Purple Mountain Laboratories, Dmall, KuGou, Futu, WeBank, QQ Music, 37Games" (README). The maintainers are affiliated with Tencent, Intel, and Purple Mountain Laboratory (MAINTAINERS.md). Treat these as where the engineering effort comes from, not as evidence of production use.

Adoption signals

As of 2026-06-28, GitHub reports roughly:

Signal	Value	Source
Stars	1,440	repo metadata
Forks	208	repo metadata
Open issues	70	repo metadata
Contributors	~48	contributors
Releases	28 total, latest v0.18.1 (2025-08-13)	releases

Clusternet was accepted to CNCF at the Sandbox maturity level on 2023-03-07 (CNCF Projects, submission cncf/sandbox#10).

Ecosystem

Clusternet integrates with several surrounding tools, per its README core features (README):

• Helm, including OCI (Open Container Initiative) charts, is built in through the HelmChart and HelmRelease CRDs.
• Clusters created by Cluster API can be auto-registered.
• Multi-cluster services use the mcs-api (the Kubernetes multi-cluster Services API).
• Monitoring works with Prometheus and Grafana.
• Cross-cluster networking can use Submariner, Istio, or Linkerd.
• A client-go wrapper (src/examples/clientgo) and a kubectl plugin installable with kubectl krew install clusternet (src/README.md:79) cover programmatic and CLI access.

Alternatives

Clusternet sits in the same space as several other CNCF multi-cluster projects. Its differentiators are network-oriented: the reverse WebSocket tunnel that makes a child reachable from the parent even behind NAT, and the shadow API that lets existing manifests flow through unchanged (Palark blog).

Alternative	Differs by
Karmada	Centered on distribution and scheduling; Clusternet also treats cross-cluster kubectl proxying as a first-class feature.
Open Cluster Management	Hub-and-agent model with a placement and policy focus; Clusternet leans on the Kubernetes scheduler framework and the shadow API.
KubeVela	Application delivery built on the Open Application Model; Clusternet stays closer to raw Kubernetes objects and kubectl.
KubeStellar	Another multi-cluster configuration management project; differs in its binding and transport model.