Zarf 2026 Roadmap

Introduction

2026 is about building long-term sustainability, provenance, and enhancing the package lifecycle from creation through deployment with enhanced state.

Support the advancement of the project with schema updates, new features, and required deprecations/removals. Additionally establishing parity with the signing and verification ecosystem that aligns natively to the airgapped environments through offline verification:

Introduce next schema version, improve structure, and identify deprecations removals
Zarf Package Signing and Verification Enhancements
Enhance values patterns to improve configuration user experience and migration
Extend, validate, and document Zarf’s support across different Kubernetes distributions.

These allow the project to iterate towards a sustainable baseline that can be supported once v1.0.0 is reached.

Operations and Security (Q2 - Q3)

As the architecture matures, package creation should establish transparency and security, as well as improving state management:

SBOM packaging, management, and publishing
Package creation security verification enhancements
Improve state management to enable more dynamic deployment scenarios and ensure resource traceability.
Security and Threat Model enhancements (mTLS for Zarf infrastructure)

These improvements provide greater trust to the packaging process and allow greater control of how deployed operations occur.

Package and Infrastructure adaptability (Q3 - Q4)

Actively investing in enhancements that simplify and expand what Zarf can do:

Package maintainability, Improve component imports, YOLO package support
Builtin Support for multi-architecture clusters
Package resource evaluation and optimization

We believe these improvements can assist in making zarf more operationally effective.

Community, Contribution & Ecosystem (Ongoing)

Throughout the year, the Zarf team remains committed to open governance and community development:

Bi-weekly community meetups to showcase demos and field feature proposals.
Zarf Enhancements Proposal process to align contributors and consumers of proposed features or changes.
Continued engagement with the OpenSSF Incubation process and secure software practices.
Broader support and Documentation for Kubernetes Distribution operations.
Creation and maintenance of learning and community materials.
Improve sustainability and governance of the project.
Respond to Critical bug fixes and vulnerabilities.

Feature Stability Guidance

Our feature lifecycle is defined as follows:

Alpha: Experimental, subject to change/removal.
Beta: Functionally complete but still evolving; documented with known caveats.
Stable: Guaranteed backwards compatibility, robust documentation and testing.
Deprecated: Marked for removal, with alternatives documented.