Zarf 2025 Roadmap

Introduction

2025 is about building resilience, empowering extensibility, and preparing the system for broader integrations through SDKs.

SDK Support & Decoupled Architecture Enable integration and extensibility by refactoring the core to cleanly separate CLI operations from library logic. This will unlock use cases for tooling integration, programmatic workflows, and community enhancements.
Resilient-by-Design Infrastructure Invest in the internal consistency, recovery, and upgrade mechanisms of Zarf to ensure performance across edge and connected environments.
Operational Enhancements Improve package lifecycle operations, diagnostics, and user observability to make Zarf more usable and reliable in production.
Workflow Stability & Expansion Mature the package lifecycle, extend schema-based definitions, and reduce the learning curve for new users through simplification and documentation.

We began the year with a deliberate push to lay the groundwork for SDK support. This involves:

Parallel to these efforts, we also focused on extending our test suite to cover decoupled components and ensure changes did not regress GA stability.

As the architecture matures, attention turns to reliability and transparency:

Improve support for chaining packages and dynamic variable injection during deploy.
Enhance package and chart values patterns and enhance configuration opportunities.
Improve supply chain lifecycle with enhanced artifact delivery and discovery.
Harden lifecycle to recover from partial failures on deploy or remove.

These upgrades strengthen Zarf’s use in production pipelines and across disconnected systems.

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

Add observable error messages and diagnostic metadata to simplify user troubleshooting.
Introduce schema enhancements from new features and deprecation removals.
Improve state management to enable more dynamic deployment scenarios and ensure resource traceability.

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

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 introduced to align contributors and consumers of proposed features or changes.
Continued engagement with the OpenSSF Incubation process and secure software practices.
Creation and maintenance of learning and community materials.
Improve sustainability and governance of the project.
Respond to Critical bug fixes and vulnerabilities.

We continue to follow the Kubernetes feature maturity model for Zarf features:

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.