History

Origin

Clusternet started as an open-source project under the clusternet GitHub organisation. The repository was created on 2021-06-07 and the first release, v0.1.0, followed on 2021-06-08 (GitHub Releases, repo metadata). The maintainers come from Tencent, Intel, and Purple Mountain Laboratory (MAINTAINERS.md).

The problem it targets is stated in its name. "Clusternet" is short for "Cluster Internet": the project wants you to manage and visit many Kubernetes clusters from one place, the way you reach any site on the internet, even when those clusters sit behind NAT or a firewall (README).

Timeline

Year	Milestone
2021	Repository created (2021-06-07) and first release v0.1.0 published (2021-06-08).
2023	Accepted to CNCF at the Sandbox maturity level on 2023-03-07 (submission cncf/sandbox#10).
2025	Latest tagged release v0.18.1 published 2025-08-13; 28 releases total.

How it evolved

The control plane grew from three components to four. From v0.15.0 onward the clusternet-controller-manager was split out as its own component, giving the current set of clusternet-agent, clusternet-scheduler, clusternet-controller-manager, and clusternet-hub (Introduction). The scheduler reuses the Kubernetes scheduler framework, ported to schedule clusters instead of nodes, which is visible in pkg/scheduler.

Kubernetes version support has moved forward with each minor line. The README compatibility matrix shows v0.18.x requires Kubernetes >=v1.30, v0.17.x supports >=v1.28,<v1.30, and v0.16.x supports <v1.28 (README).

Where it stands now

Clusternet remains a CNCF Sandbox project (CNCF Projects). The latest tagged release is v0.18.1 (2025-08-13), and the pinned commit for this deep-dive (e8b5a0c, 2026-05-10) is main ahead of that tag. As of 2026-06-28 the repository reports about 1,440 stars, 208 forks, and roughly 48 contributors (repo metadata, contributors). The CRDs and APIs are also published as a separate github.com/clusternet/apis module for consumers (README).