Nearly one year ago, a flagpole was planted to launch Rust Cloud Native. We have had great successes since then, including great meetups, great conversations, folks working on and sharing differing projects, and more.

However, after speaking with other folks in the organization, we have decided to convert Rust Cloud Native to Awesome Rust Cloud Native. Since Rust Cloud Native never had any formal communications platforms, I sent a message to the primary channel of the Discord server this morning and we plan on updating the core repository’s README as soon as possible. Here are the contents of that message (slightly modified in order to make more sense outside of Discord):

Hi friends @here!

First and foremost, I want to thank you all for being here and hanging out with the meetups we’ve had, the conversations we’ve had, and everything we’ve done together. You are all delights!

The maintainers and I spoke this morning and decided that Rust Cloud Native should not live on as a structured organization at this time. I’ll explain the “what’s happening” before the “why” so folks know.

  • This server will close sometime on Wednesday, July 28th
    • Given some feedback, this may be subject to change or there may be plans to have a more conversational/casual server in its place (regardless, it is recommended to prepare for server closure)
  • The GitHub org will be renamed from “Rust Cloud Native” to “Awesome Rust Cloud Native”
  • The core repository will be converted to “awesome” list: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
    • It may also convert from a GitHub Page to just a README, but that one is still in flux (regardless, we will update the README there with more details)

Short version: Rust Cloud Native will be scaled back to solely maintain the “awesome” page that we already mostly have going. Now, this doesn’t mean that things like “beginner resources” and such cannot be added later. However, it does mean that the core repository will be refactored to scale it down for now.

Since this org does not have a blog or Twitter account, I presume we will let folks who have starred the repository know by adding a message at the top of the README and/or website for now.

Now, onto the reasoning: running a structured organization requires time and willingness. I will speak for myself here: I created the organization in a very different world for me personally, and after no longer working on cloud native software and experiencing burnout in 2021, I reeled back many non-essential things to deal with things in my personal life. While it was originally started as a “let’s plant a flag pole and get folks to gather” effort, it is evident that it required more curation than I had the volunteer time to give it. I cannot speak for others, and I appreciate your respect to their privacy.

We would hand off the organization to willing parties, but truthfully, there is not much of an organization to hand off. On GitHub, the organization has really only existed to main the core website, which is already like an “awesome” list. At this time, we are interested keeping what we have: the core repository.

Thus, we will be freeing the “Rust Cloud Native” name up for folks who will want to use it. Fortunately, given the successes of kube-rs, youki, krustlet, krunvm and many more projects, as fans of the languages, we think things will be just fine.

I want to apologize that this did not work out as intended. There were definitely successful moments, including the core repository itself, our nice conversation and meetups when they did happen, and a recognition of interest in Cloud Native Rust overall. Thank you for helping us to try to make this work.

Thank you all for reading this post as well. The future of Rust in the Cloud Native space is brighter than ever before, and I am excited to see it continue to shine 🦀.