Adoption & Ecosystem
Who uses it
The repository has no ADOPTERS.md at the pinned commit; the named adopter list lives on the CNCF side. The CNCF Incubating announcement (2023-03-02) explicitly lists the organisations below (CNCF blog).
| Organisation | Use case | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Alibaba Group | Runs OpenKruise workloads at Double 11 scale, near 100,000 workloads and millions of containers | Alibaba Cloud blog |
| Baidu | Listed adopter | CNCF blog |
| Bringg | Listed adopter | CNCF blog |
| Listed adopter | CNCF blog | |
| Lyft | Listed adopter | CNCF blog |
| Shopee | Listed adopter | CNCF blog |
| Oppo | Listed adopter | CNCF blog |
| Spectro Cloud | Listed adopter | CNCF blog |
Adoption signals
Measured against the GitHub REST API on 2026-06-24 (API):
- Stars: 5,273. Forks: 892. Open issues: 93.
- Contributors: the contributors API paginates to roughly 160-plus (page 161 at per_page=1, anonymous included).
- Repository created 2019-05-30, last push 2026-06-21, latest release v1.9.0 (2026-06-21).
- Single-language Go codebase.
Ecosystem
- kruise-rollouts: a separate repository for progressive delivery that can drive OpenKruise workloads.
- OpenKruiseGame (kruise-game): game-server-oriented workloads built on the same foundation.
- kruise Helm charts: the supported install path.
- KubeVela / OAM: layer application models on top of OpenKruise workloads (same Alibaba-origin ecosystem).
- Service meshes: SidecarSet sidecar management overlaps with and complements mesh sidecar operations such as Istio's; since v1.7 SidecarSet supports native Kubernetes sidecar containers.
Alternatives
| Alternative | Differs by |
|---|---|
| Upstream Deployment / StatefulSet / DaemonSet | OpenKruise's CloneSet, Advanced StatefulSet, and Advanced DaemonSet are supersets: in-place update, partition canary, per-Pod PVC, deletion-cost control, parallel update. |
| Argo Rollouts / Flagger | Progressive delivery (canary, blue-green, metric analysis, traffic shifting) is the focus. OpenKruise focuses on avoiding Pod recreation and on workload primitives; Argo Rollouts can target a CloneSet as the managed workload. |
| KubeVela / OAM | Application-model and platform layer above the workloads, not a workload controller itself. |