NATS Leaving CNCF: Some History and Thoughts

Colin Sullivan • April 28, 2025

There’s been a lot of heated discussion around NATS leaving CNCF and there are two sides to this coin. I’d like to share a few thoughts and history since I’ve been a maintainer with varying degrees of engagement since 2015.

CNCF and NATS

First, I want to say CNCF is an excellent organization for many projects! Projects like Kubernetes, Open Telemetry, Prometheus have thrived under CNCF. They have many contributors from large corporations and are solid projects mature in their lifecycle. These types of projects are a great fit for CNCF.


I’d also like to acknowledge that CNCF did help the NATS project in ways, and as a maintainer I’m grateful for that. The exciting conferences were a blast, we were able to speak and advocate for NATS, and we had a booth at most conferences. NATS was allowed keynote speaker time, we had some basic marketing assistance and reports. It was good stuff, and I have great memories of the conferences.


While CNCF is great for many projects, they aren’t for all. Behind the scenes things weren’t great for the NATS project.

Graduation Efforts

I was part of the effort to get the NATS project to a graduated status in CNCF. We were excited and proud of NATS - millions of downloads of the server, and we’d built a thriving community, so we proposed NATS for graduation in CNCF. From 2018 through 2020, at the behest of the CNCF TOC (Technical Oversight Committee), we changed our processes and added external maintainers to help in order to graduate. We had met the written qualifications of the graduation criteria. Despite this, the bar kept moving. The CNCF TOC felt that we had too many maintainers from Synadia on the server. This can be seen in the graduation PR and in comments made in the CNCF TOC meetings. It seemed like the graduation process became qualitative, and we were being held to a higher standard than previous projects. We had noticed another project with maintainers from primarily one organization had graduated with ease, which didn’t sit right.


Graduation stalled. After some time, it seemed pretty clear that NATS wasn’t a fit for the types of projects CNCF wanted. At this point we internally started discussing leaving CNCF as we felt NATS couldn’t graduate in a form that would keep the NATS culture of moving fast and allow NATS to evolve at the pace the community wanted and expected. Drastically changing the project wasn’t what we signed up for or expected. We’d discussed another home, and even kicked around the idea of creating a foundation of our own. This was 2020, so leaving now isn’t a surprise to many of the NATS maintainers.


Ultimately this resulted in a 100% “yea” vote to leave from the maintainers that participated in the voting process. While CNCF is wonderful for many projects, it was very clear that CNCF was not the right fit for NATS.

NATS and Synadia

When I was product manager of NATS (across Apcera and Synadia), we spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours developing NATS, primarily paid by Synadia. We had some external contributions, primarily around clients and integrations, but core NATS remained primarily funded by Synadia with dedicated NATS engineers. There was a certain level of expertise required and it took months to truly understand the server. We would have certainly loved external maintainers, and invited some of our users who had the resources (namely large corporations) to donate developer hours. Some of the feedback we received was that the server was too complicated and companies preferred to fund development through commercial relationships. I can understand this, and it’s not difficult to connect the dots from this to Synadia forking with a BUSL license.


Synadia had to defend the NATS trademark, and I recall CNCF offered to compensate only a fraction we paid. It's my understanding that we didn’t receive any compensation. It was a lot for a startup to cover, and made me wonder how committed CNCF was to NATS.

Leaving CNCF

Given the history, and the prospect of having NATS archived because it doesn't fit the CNCF mold, I understand and support the decision to leave CNCF.


To support their decision to prevent NATS from leaving, CNCF used the argument that NATS has a breadth of contributions across companies, even citing “over 700 other organizations”. CNCF dismissed this same argument made from the NATS maintainers, preventing graduation. This was wild to read; I’m still shaking my head.


I do also understand CNCF’s frustration with NATS leaving. It’s unprecedented and could open the door for other projects to leave. Unfortunately Synadia was painted in a bad light when they will still offer free software to the NATS community (albeit via a different process). The maintainers of NATS and NATS’ creator, Derek Collison, strongly believe in open source principals. 

Licensing

I don’t begrudge companies from using a BUSL license alongside OSS contributions. Sure, there’s a knee-jerk reaction - I’m a big open source advocate and to be honest, it stings. However, from the other point of view, an OSS project of NATS magnitude is a tremendous contribution from a startup. Large enterprises who use free projects should support them in some form or another. But they often do not. I’d rather see NATS live on than be archived by CNCF. We have to remind ourselves - as much as we like free open source software, we’re not entitled to it. It’s a gift.

Wrapping Up

We can’t tell exactly what the future of NATS will look like but I’m hoping for the best. Given that Synadia has funded nearly all of the development, allowing them to further commercialize the technology will help ensure the future of the NATS project. I understand NATS will still be OSS, and they’ll still provide open and free software with new features for companies under a certain revenue level, developers, and hobbyists.


All in all, this is a change for NATS and CNCF, but I understand it.