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README.md
Project Releases Paused Until Maintainer Team is Rebuilt ⚠️
The current maintainers of External Secrets Operator decided to pause official SemVer releases.
Despite strong adoption and a growing user base, the project is currently maintained by a very small core team. This limited capacity makes it unsustainable to continue regular development, community support, and release management.
To ensure the long-term health of the project, we are temporarily pausing all official releases - including new features, patches, and published container images - until we have at least five consistent, long-term community maintainers.
What does this mean?
✅ We will continue reviewing and merging community PRs.
✅ Contributions will be available on the main branch.
❌ We will not provide support via GitHub Discussions, Slack, or issue comments.
❌ We will not publish any new releases (major, minor, or patch), including 0.19.x and 1.0.x.
How You Can Help
If your company or team relies on External Secrets Operator, please consider contributing back - especially if you work for an organization with a defined open source strategy.
➡️ To get involved, please fill out this form.
You can also check out the Governance document or join the GitHub Issue for more context.
We truly regret having to take this step, but it's necessary to raise awareness among the many organizations relying on External Secrets in production. We need your support to continue moving the project forward.
Thank you for your understanding and for being part of this community.
External Secrets
External Secrets Operator is a Kubernetes operator that integrates external secret management systems like AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, Google Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, IBM Cloud Secrets Manager, Akeyless, CyberArk Conjur, Pulumi ESC and many more. The operator reads information from external APIs and automatically injects the values into a Kubernetes Secret.
Multiple people and organizations are joining efforts to create a single External Secrets solution based on existing projects. If you are curious about the origins of this project, check out this issue and this PR.
Documentation
External Secrets Operator guides and reference documentation is available at external-secrets.io. Also see our stability and support policy.
Contributing
We welcome and encourage contributions to this project! Please read the Developer and Contribution process guides. Also make sure to check the Code of Conduct and adhere to its guidelines.
Sponsoring
Please consider sponsoring this project, there are many ways you can help us with: engineering time, providing infrastructure, donating money, etc. We are open to cooperations, feel free to approach as and we discuss how this could look like. We can keep your contribution anonymized if that's required (depending on the type of contribution), and anonymous donations are possible inside Opencollective.
Bi-weekly Development Meeting
We host our development meeting every odd wednesday on Jitsi. We run the meeting with alternating times 8:00 PM Berlin Time and 1:00 PM Berlin Time, we'll announce the time in our Kubernetes Slack channel. Meeting notes are recorded on hackmd.
Anyone is welcome to join. Feel free to ask questions, request feedback, raise awareness for an issue, or just say hi. ;)
Security
Please report vulnerabilities by email to cncf-ExternalSecretsOp-maintainers@lists.cncf.io. Also see our SECURITY.md file for details.
software bill of materials
We attach SBOM and provenance file to our GitHub release. Also, they are attached to container images.
Adopters
Please create a PR and add your company or project to our ADOPTERS.md file if you are using our project!
Roadmap
You can find the roadmap in our documentation: https://external-secrets.io/main/contributing/roadmap/
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