Being a top level incubating CNCF project requires having a governance structure to ensure that there is a publicly documented process for making decisions regarding the project and the community. While Helm was under Kubernetes, we relied on Kubernetes governance. As part of the transition to CNCF, the Helm project is required to have its own governance structure. To handle this we set up a provisional governance with a goal of creating a long term one. After a few months we are happy to announce that the new governance structure has been written and approved.

When Helm was part of the Kubernetes project it, like the rest of Kubernetes, used the CNCF Contributor License Agreement (CLA). This served Helm well for years. But, most of the CNCF projects use a Developers Certificate of Origin (DCO) instead of a CLA. The exceptions are Kubernetes and gRPC. Upon Helm becoming a CNCF project itself we were asked if we wanted to move Helm to a DCO. After some careful consideration and a little research, the Helm maintainers voted to move to a DCO.

Rimas Mocevicius (rimusz) has become the fourth Helm Emeritus Maintainer.

Earlier this summer, we announced that Helm joined the CNCF as an official incubating project. Part of that transition involves moving the Helm project out of the Kubernetes GitHub org and into its org. We’re excited to announce that we’ve completed that process. As of last week, we have moved the Helm code repository to https://github.com/helm/helm.

Today we are happy to announce that Helm has become an official top-level CNCF project, joining the ranks of Prometheus, Linkerd, OpenTracing, and others. Helm will enter the CNCF as an incubating project as we continue to work on the next-generation Helm 3 cloud-native package manager.