Falco Graduates within the CNCF!
Today, the Falco project hit a big milestone: becoming a CNCF Graduated Project! Falco's graduation indicates the project's maturity and dependability, but most importantly, it is the culmination of a fantastic amount of work.
The journey for Falco started in 2016 when the first commit was made. Today, Falco has become synonymous with "runtime security" due to its comprehensive approach to securing the highly complex and dynamic environments of the modern cloud era.
“Falco approaches the security challenges associated with managing cloud native environments holistically,” says Loris Degioanni, the project’s founder. ”Runtime security is more than eBPF-based data collection, it requires enrichment, orchestrator integration, correlation of different data sources, and a rich, well-maintained policy library. All of the things that Falco provides to its users.”
This holistic, runtime-centric approach to security is what makes Falco unique. It enables any organization to secure their infrastructure — from scrappy startups to Fortune 500s. Since joining the CNCF, some of the largest enterprises in the world, including Amazon, Apple, IBM, and Red Hat, have contributed to Falco. The project also has a strong, rapidly growing community of adopters and has been downloaded over 100 million times!
To the thousands of people who have helped Falco fly over the past years, thank you — sincerely. Thank you to the Falco maintainers. Thank you to our CNCF Technical Oversight Committee sponsors, Emily Fox and Justin Cormack. Thank you to anyone who has ever raised an issue, submitted a pull request on GitHub, or just took part in our community.
Thank you, also, to the thousands of organizations who have entrusted Falco with the security of your runtime environments.
For us, Falco’s Graduation represents a calling to continue to improve the project in a way that serves its users. We believe that runtime protection is vital to security, and that Falco is well positioned to power that security as we move deeper into the cloud era.
In the future, Falco will have even stronger detections, richer signals, lower noise, and better performance. Its breadth of coverage will increase with more data sources, including cloud logs and key developer touchpoints like GitHub. Future versions of Falco will be even easier to deploy and manage in production.
Our mission is to make Falco a powerful companion that brings you peace of mind, knowing your cloud native apps are well looked after. We hope you will continue to be part of this journey with us.
Words from our community
Graduation means a lot to the members of our community. We asked them to share their thoughts and feelings with us on this occasion. Here is what they had to say:
"Since joining the Falco project in 2020, I've been inspired by our community's growth and commitment to open source values. Falco has unequivocally established itself as the quintessential tool for cloud native runtime security, leveraging key technologies like eBPF – notably, becoming one of the largest open source eBPF codebases. As we reach the CNCF graduation milestone, I'm immensely proud of our collective achievements and want to thank every contributor who has played a role in this journey." - Leonardo Grasso, Falco core maintainer
"Linux kernel security monitoring is undeniably mission-critical, in great demand, yet daunting to master. Working within the kernel can be intimidating due to its potential impact on application performance and the sheer volume of events on modern servers. Since joining in 2022, The Falco Project has adapted to meet new demands while staying true to its mission, and this journey continues to accelerate. Observing Falco's effectiveness and value in real-world production settings is truly beautiful." - Melissa Kilby, Falco core maintainer
"Back when I joined the Falco community, the project was a teenager that needed some love; here we are, it took a little while but it is now an adult! And I loved every little bit of its growth! What do I love more? The fact that we still have a lot of space for improvements, everywhere. This is good for users, the wider community and for us, developers and maintainers of the projects, to keep the fun with it." - Federico Di Pierro, Falco core maintainer
"It has been a long journey since my first try of Falco. It was its very first release, Kubernetes was a small thing and the containers started to become the game changer we know now. I'm very proud having been a modest piece of this achievement, developing tools for Falco made me a better DevOps, a better Go developer, an international speaker and it made me meet amazing users and contributors. It's a good thing to see it’s rising as a standard for the runtime security in the industry. I hope it will help even more SREs to peacefully sleep at night." - Thomas Labarussias, Falco core maintainer
"The project's rapid growth is evident with each new milestone, and I take great pride in being a member of this team, of this family. There's boundless potential for the project's expansion, and I see this milestone as the first step toward an even brighter future." - Andrea Terzolo, Falco core maintainer
"I have been following Falco for many years now and I am impressed by how far the project has come. I am personally proud and happy that I could be a part of the stellar team that drives Falco; thanks to maintainer's and contributor's efforts we were able to achieve incredible goals and it is great to see the project being recognized alongside the most successful in the CNCF. Thanks to everyone who has been with us in this journey and everyone who will join us in the future." - Luca Guerra, Falco core maintainer
"It's hard to believe that more than two years have already passed since I joined the amazing open source community of Falco. I can't express my deep gratitude for all our supporters and for the Falco family. This project gave me the privilege of connecting with incredibly skilled humans, and of witnessing the growth of a beautiful piece of technology that's now a fundamental security asset for countless organizations in the industry. Looking back, I feel immensely proud of all the collective efforts that led the project to this huge milestone, and I can't wait to see what the future holds from this point forward." - Jason Dellaluce, Falco core maintainer
"Today, I am immensely proud as Falco graduates within the CNCF. This achievement is a testament to the dedication of our maintainers and the broader community of adopters and contributors. Together, we’ve propelled Falco to become the industry’s de-facto standard for runtime threat detection in the cloud. I am deeply grateful for the collaborative efforts that have brought us to this moment. The tireless work, expertise, and passion shared by our team and community have elevated Falco’s capabilities, ensuring its effectiveness in safeguarding organizations against evolving security threats. As we enter this new chapter within the CNCF, I am confident in our collective ability to continue innovating and strengthening Falco’s position as a vital tool in the fight for cloud security." - Michele Zuccala, Falco core maintainer
"Since I joined, contributing to the ecosystem with passion and excitement to know more about and to contribute to this project, I've found a welcoming, vibrant, and healthy community as well as a strong maintainership. With time, the community grew and grew, and independence and diversity increased during these years. Nowadays, runtime security in the cloud native world is becoming more and more fundamental in our architectures, and Falco has become one of the de-facto standards for increasing observability in our Linux kernel-based cloud native systems. The project has evolved a lot during the last couple of years. I remember the design proposal for plugins back then! Thanks to the incredible work of the maintainers and the contributors, and now I can't explain how much this big step and acknowledgment from the CNCF matter! Congratulations to the Falco family!" - Massimiliano Giovagnoli, Falco core maintainer
