Open Cluster Management (OCM) becomes a CNCF Incubating Project
The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Open Cluster Management as a CNCF incubating project.
Open Cluster Management is an open source project that simplifies the management of Kubernetes clusters across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Using a hub-and-spoke architecture and open APIs, OCM enables organizations to manage cluster registration, application deployment, and workload placement across multiple clusters without relying on a proprietary control plane.
“Reaching CNCF incubation validates the engineering rigor of our global maintainers and the growing adoption of OCM across large-scale production fleets,” said Mike Ng, Maintainer, Open Cluster Management. From an architecture perspective, what I’m proudest of is our commitment to a lightweight, modular foundation rather than a monolithic platform. Built in close alignment with Kubernetes SIG-Multicluster standards, our asynchronous pull model guarantees cluster autonomy without centralizing sensitive credentials on the hub. Just as importantly, our pluggable add-on framework turns OCM into an extensible substrate, making it effortless for other cloud-native projects to inherit multicluster capabilities without reinventing the plumbing. Looking ahead, we are focused on streamlining setup and onboarding while advancing progressive rollouts for safer workload delivery, ultimately keeping distributed Kubernetes simple, secure, and composable.”
Open Cluster Management’s Milestones and Ecosystem Development
As organizations grow beyond a handful of Kubernetes clusters across clouds, regions, edge locations, and teams, they have to register and onboard clusters, distribute applications and policies, keep configuration consistent, and recover from failures without disrupting running workloads. Open Cluster Management provides these capabilities through vendor neutral, declarative Kubernetes APIs, and its hub-and-spoke model is designed to survive the failure and recovery of components without interrupting workloads.
Originally developed by IBM and Red Hat, Open Cluster Management joined the CNCF Sandbox in November 2021. Since reaching its 1.0 release in June 2025, the project has delivered four subsequent minor updates (up through 1.4 in October 2026), expanding its capabilities for multicluster management, application delivery, and observability. Key release highlights include:
- CEL-based cluster selection and an Argo CD pull model add-on (1.0)
- A gRPC-based hub-and-spoke connection, plus add-ons for Kueue MultiKueue and OpenTelemetry (1.1)
- Advanced Placement configuration, automated hosting cluster resolution, and the introduction of the argocd-agent integration to provide highly scalable multi-cluster GitOps and complete application status visibility (1.2)
- Enhancements to ManifestWork resource ordering and the graduation of the AddOnTemplate API to v1beta1 (1.3)
- Syncing OCM PlacementDecisions to SIG Multicluster’s PlacementDecision API, ManifestWork observability, and security hardening such as network policies (1.4)
OCM works closely with the broader cloud native ecosystem. It implements and aligns with the Kubernetes SIG Multicluster APIs, supplies Argo CD with cluster decisions for GitOps deployments, and integrates with Cluster API for cluster lifecycle. KubeVela, KubeStellar, Kueue, and Meshery all document OCM integrations, and the project maintains add-ons and examples for Argo CD, Fluid, and OpenTelemetry. Twenty-seven maintainers from eight organizations, including Red Hat, Guidewire, eBay, AppsCode, and Spectro Cloud, lead the project.
OCM has demonstrated adoption across organizations including Alibaba Cloud, AppsCode, Guidewire, Red Hat, and Spectro Cloud. At eBay, OCM supports application deployment across more than 190 Kubernetes clusters through integrations with Argo CD. Groww uses OCM to support progressive application rollouts, while VESSEL AI leverages the project to manage GPU clusters and distribute AI workloads across cloud environments.
“As Kubernetes adoption expands across increasingly complex environments, organizations need open, interoperable approaches to managing clusters at scale,” said Karena Angell, CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member. “Open Cluster Management has demonstrated technical maturity, a growing contributor community, and meaningful adoption across the cloud native ecosystem. Its advancement to incubation reflects the project’s progress in helping organizations manage multicluster environments without relying on proprietary solutions.”
Main Components
Open Cluster Management’s main components consist of the following:
- Cluster Manager: The hub side control plane that coordinates registration, work, placement, and add-ons.
- Klusterlet: The agent on each managed cluster that registers it with the hub and applies instructions from it.
- Cluster Inventory (registration): Registers manage clusters through a double opt-in handshake and mTLS connection, with certificate rotation and a dedicated namespace per cluster on the hub.
- ManifestWork API: Distributes Kubernetes resources to managed clusters, with update strategies, conflict resolution, and status feedback. Agents pull work from the hub, so the hub does not store managed cluster credentials.
- Placement API: Dynamically selects clusters using labels, resource capacity, or custom criteria and publishes the result as a PlacementDecision that any scheduler or controller can consume.
- Add-on framework: A structure for projects to become multicluster aware, handling registration, lifecycle, configuration, and status reporting.
- clusteradm: A command line tool to bootstrap a hub and join clusters.
- Built-in extensions: Cluster API integration for cluster lifecycle, an Argo CD add-on for pull-based application delivery, and governance, risk, and compliance policy controllers.
Notable Milestones
CNCF-Hosted Projects
The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to CNCF projects, overseeing their progression through maturity levels and supporting long-term sustainability. Projects advancing to incubation demonstrate growing adoption, technical maturity, and community development.
As a CNCF-hosted project, Open Cluster Management is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. OCM joins incubating technologies Artifact Hub, Backstage, Chaos Mesh, Cloud Custodian, Container Network Interface (CNI), Contour, Cortex, Emissary-ingress, Fluid, gRPC, HAMi, k8gb, Keycloak, KServe, Kubescape, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Lima, Litmus, Longhorn, Meshery, metal3-io, Microcks, Notary Project, OpenCost, OpenFeature, OpenFGA, OpenKruise, OpenYurt, Operator Framework, Strimzi, Tekton, Thanos, Volcano, and wasmCloud.
For detailed maturity requirements at each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.