Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs) transform your application source code into container images that can run on any cloud. With buildpacks, organizations can concentrate the knowledge of container build best practices within a specialized team, instead of having application developers across the organization individually maintain their own Dockerfiles. This makes it easier to know what is inside application images, enforce security and compliance requirements, and perform upgrades with minimal effort and intervention.

The CNB project maintains a set of specifications and tooling that make it possible to write buildpacks and orchestrate them together in a build system. Additionally, community providers such as Google, Heroku, and the Paketo project maintain buildpacks for a wide variety of language families, and you can discover even more by searching the buildpack registry.

Buildpacks were first conceived by Heroku in 2011. Since then, they have been adopted by Cloud Foundry and other PaaS such as Google App Engine, Gitlab, Knative, Deis, Dokku, and Drie.

The Cloud Native Buildpacks project was initiated by Pivotal and Heroku in January 2018 and joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in October 2018. The project aims to unify the buildpack ecosystems with a platform-to-buildpack contract that is well-defined and that incorporates learnings from maintaining production-grade buildpacks for years at both Pivotal and Heroku.

Cloud Native Buildpacks embrace modern container standards, such as the OCI image format. They take advantage of the latest capabilities of these standards, such as cross-repository blob mounting and image layer "rebasing" on Docker API v2 registries.