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Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation founded in 2015 to support cloud-native computing.[1]

Key Information

History

[edit]

It was announced alongside Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the Linux Foundation by Google as a seed technology. Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, RX-M, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware.[2][3] Today, CNCF is supported by over 450 members.[4]

In August 2018 Google announced that it was handing over operational control of Kubernetes to the community.[5]

Projects

[edit]
  • Argo is a collection of tools for getting work done with Kubernetes. Among its main features are Workflows and Events. It was accepted to CNCF on March 26, 2020 at the Incubating maturity level and then moved to the Graduated maturity level on December 6, 2022.[6]
  • Cilium provides networking, security, and observability for Kubernetes deployments using eBPF technology. It joined the CNCF at incubation level in October 2021[7] and the CNCF announced its graduation in October 2023.[8]
  • containerd is an industry-standard core container runtime. It is currently available as a daemon for Linux and Windows, which can manage the complete container lifecycle of its host system. In 2015, Docker donated the OCI Specification to The Linux Foundation with a reference implementation called runc. Since February 28, 2019 it is an official CNCF project.[9] Its general availability and intention to donate the project to CNCF was announced by Docker in 2017.[10][11]
  • CoreDNS is a DNS server that chains plugins. Its graduation was announced in 2019.[12]
  • Dapr, the distributed application runtime, provides APIs for building secure and reliable microservices and agentic AI systems. Dapr was donated to the CNCF in November 2021 and joined at incubation level[13]. The CNCF announced its graduation in November 2024[14].
  • Envoy: Originally built at Lyft to move their architecture away from a monolith, Envoy is a high-performance open source edge and service proxy that makes the network transparent to applications. Lyft contributed Envoy to Cloud Native Computing Foundation in September 2017.[15]
  • etcd is a distributed key value store, providing a method of storing data across a cluster of machines.[16] It became a CNCF incubating project in 2018 at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America[17] in Seattle that year.[18]
  • Falco is an open source and cloud native runtime security initiative. It is the "de facto Kubernetes threat detection engine".[19] It became an incubating project in January 2020 [20] and graduated in February 2024.[21]
  • Flux[22] is an open source project for powering GitOps in Kubernetes clusters. It provides the GitOps Toolkit, a set of Kubernetes APIs that allow you to define how configuration source code is securely pulled into your cluster and deployed by popular Kubernetes manifests rendering engines like Kustomize and Helm. The most recommended source mechanism is the OCIRepository API, which provides enhanced security and benefits from container image tooling out there. Flux has also notification integrations with popular services like Prometheus Alertmanager, PagerDuty, Slack and so on. Flux has graduated in CNCF in 2022.[23]
  • Harbor is an "open source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, signs, and scans content."[24] It became an incubating project in September 2019[25] and graduated in June 2020.[26]
  • Helm is a package manager that helps developers "easily manage and deploy applications onto the Kubernetes cluster."[25] It joined the incubating level in June 2018 and graduated in April 2020.[27]
  • Istio is a service mesh technology. It was accepted by CNCF in September 2022 and graduated on July 12, 2023.[28][29]
  • Jaeger, Created by Uber Engineering, Jaeger is an open source distributed tracing system inspired by Google Dapper paper and OpenZipkin community. It can be used for tracing microservice-based architectures, including distributed context propagation, distributed transaction monitoring, root cause analysis, service dependency analysis, and performance/latency optimization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept Jaeger as the 12th hosted project in September 2017[30] and became a graduated project in 2019.[31] In 2020 it became an approved and fully integrated part of the CNCF ecosystem.[32]
  • Kubernetes is an open source framework for automating deployment and managing applications in a containerized and clustered environment. "It aims to provide better ways of managing related, distributed components across the varied infrastructure."[33] It was originally designed by Google and donated to The Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Kubernetes as the seed technology.[34] The "large and diverse" community supporting the project has made its staying power more robust than other, older technologies of the same ilk.[35] In January 2020, the CNCF annual report showed significant growth in interest, training, event attendance and investment related to Kubernetes.[36]
  • Linkerd is CNCF's fifth member project, and the project that coined the term "service mesh".[37] Linkerd adds observability, security, and reliability features to applications by adding them to the platform rather than the application layer,[38] and features a "micro-proxy" to maximize speed and security of its data plane.[39] Linkerd graduated from CNCF in July 2021.[40]
  • Open Policy Agent (OPA) is "an open source general-purpose policy engine and language for cloud infrastructure."[41] It became a CNCF incubating project in April 2019.[42] OPA graduated from CNCF in February 2021.[43]
  • Prometheus is a cloud monitoring tool sponsored by SoundCloud in early iterations. In August 2018, the tool was designated a graduated project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.[44] It is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation member project.
  • Rook is CNCF's first cloud native storage project.[45] It became an incubation level project in 2018[46] and graduated in October 2020.[47]
  • SPIFFE is an open standard and framework for workload identity, much the same way that OAuth is an open standard and framework for human identity. It is built from the ground up to accommodate modern computing environments, which operate with systems scale and velocity (as opposed to human scale and velocity), while still maintaining interoperability with existing technologies like OAuth and X.509 Public key infrastructure. Unlike other identity standards, SPIFFE supports multiple credential types for a single identity, ensuring that the highly varied needs of production environments are consistently met without compromise. SPIFFE joined the CNCF as a sandbox project in 2018, was accepted to incubation in 2020, and graduated in 2022.[48]
  • SPIRE is an open source identity provider for workloads based on the SPIFFE framework. It is highly pluggable, and fills the attestation and issuance needs required by any workload identity solution. The plugin interfaces it exposes allows users to write integrations with in-house systems, build internal self-service portals, and more. It is a very powerful building block for issuing short-lived identity credentials to dynamic cloud workloads. SPIRE became a CNCF Graduated project in 2022.[48]
  • The Update Framework (TUF) helps developers to secure new or existing software update systems, which are often found to be vulnerable to many known attacks. TUF addresses this widespread problem by providing a comprehensive, flexible security framework that developers can integrate with any software update system. TUF was CNCF's first security-focused project and the ninth project overall to graduate from the foundation's hosting program.[49]
  • TiKV provides a distributed key–value database.[50]
  • Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, first created for internal use by YouTube. It became a CNCF project in 2018 and graduated in November 2019.[51]
  • Contour is a management server for Envoy that can direct the management of Kubernetes' traffic. Contour also provides routing features that are more advanced than Kubernetes' out-of-the-box Ingress specification. VMWare contributed the project to CNCF in July 2020.[52]
  • Cortex offers horizontally scalable, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus and works alongside Amazon DynamoDB, Google Bigtable, Cassandra, S3, GCS, and Microsoft Azure. It was introduced into the ecosystem incubator alongside Thanos in August 2020.[53]
  • CRI-O is an Open Container Initiative (OCI) based "implementation of Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface".[54] CRI-O allows Kubernetes to be container runtime-agnostic.[55] It became an incubating project in 2019.[56]
  • gRPC is a "modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment."[57] The project was formed in 2015 when Google decided to open source the next version of its RPC infrastructure ("Stubby").[58] The project has a number of early large industry adopters such as Square, Inc., Netflix, and Cisco.[57]
  • Keycloak is an open-source software product to allow single sign-on with identity and access management aimed at modern applications and services. Until April 2023, this WildFly community project was under the stewardship of Red Hat. In April 2023, Keycloak became a CNCF incubating project.[59]
  • KubeEdge: In September 2020, CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) announced that KubeEdge was accepted as an incubating project. The project was created at Futurewei (a Huawei partner). KubeEdge's goal is to "make edge devices an extension of the cloud".[60]
  • Kuma: In June 2020, API management platform Kong announced that it would donate its open-source service mesh control plane technology, called Kuma, to CNCF as a sandbox project.[61]
  • Litmus: In July 2020, MayaData donated Litmus, an open source chaos engineering tool that runs natively on Kubernetes, to CNCF as a sandbox-level project.[62]
  • NATS consists of a collection of open source messaging technologies that "implements the publish/subscribe, request/reply and distributed queue patterns to help create a performant and secure method of InterProcess Communication (IPC)."[63] It existed independently for a number of years but gained wider reach since becoming a CNCF incubating project.[64]
  • Notary is an open source project that enables widespread trust over arbitrary data collections.[65] Notary was released by Docker in 2015 and became a CNCF project in 2017.[66]
  • OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework created when CNCF merged the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects.[67] OpenTracing offers "consistent, expressive, vendor-neutral APIs for popular platforms"[68] while the Google-created OpenCensus project acts as a "collection of language-specific libraries for instrumenting an application, collecting stats (metrics), and exporting data to a supported backend."[69] Under OpenTelemetry, the projects create a "complete telemetry system [that is] suitable for monitoring microservices and other types of modern, distributed systems — and [is] compatible with most major OSS and commercial backends."[70] It is the "second most active" CNCF project.[71] In October 2020, AWS announced the public preview of its distro for OpenTelemetry.[72]
  • Thanos enables global query views and unlimited retention of metrics. It was designed to be easily addable to Prometheus deployments.[53]

References

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Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a and subsidiary of the dedicated to making ubiquitous by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of , vendor-neutral projects that empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. uses an stack to deploy applications as , packaging each part into its own to enable dynamic scaling, efficient resource use, and resilient operations in production. Founded on June 21, 2015, under the , the CNCF was established to advance the state-of-the-art for building cloud native applications and services through collaboration among developers, end users, and vendors. Its initial members included major technology companies such as , , , Docker, and , which committed to driving adoption of common technologies, improving developer experiences, and defining APIs and standards via a code-first approach in partnership with initiatives like the . The foundation's mission emphasizes neutrality, ensuring that projects remain free from while promoting widespread innovation in areas like orchestration, , and service meshes. As of 2024, the CNCF hosts over 200 active projects across graduated, incubating, and sandbox stages (30 graduated, 34 incubating, 129 sandbox), including flagship graduated projects like (the first to graduate in 2018), (for monitoring), and Envoy (for edge and service proxy). These projects have attracted over 270,000 contributors from 189 countries and are used by thousands of organizations worldwide to deploy resilient, observable, and manageable distributed systems. The foundation also maintains the CNCF Cloud Native Landscape, a visual map categorizing tools and platforms in the ecosystem to guide adoption and discovery. The CNCF supports its community through large-scale events like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, which drew over 29,000 attendees across and in 2023, as well as regional Community Days and specialized conferences on and networking. With over 800 member organizations spanning —including platinum members like , AWS, and —the foundation drives end-user adoption via programs like the End User Technology Advisory Board and training initiatives that have registered over 18,000 individuals for certifications such as the and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA). By 2025, the CNCF continues to expand its influence, including new events in regions like and , and a growing focus on AI workloads, marking a decade of growth in cloud native technologies that underpin global infrastructure.

Overview

Mission and Principles

Cloud native computing encompasses the design and development of applications optimized for cloud environments, utilizing technologies such as containers, service meshes, , immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs to create scalable, resilient, manageable, and observable systems that function effectively in dynamic orchestrators across public, private, or hybrid clouds. These technologies enable organizations to build applications that leverage for deployment, scaling, and management, emphasizing and without reliance on traditional hardware-specific configurations. The (CNCF) pursues a mission to make ubiquitous by nurturing an ecosystem of high-quality, projects that are vendor-neutral and focused on . This involves providing sustained technical oversight, resources, and community support to ensure projects evolve to meet industry needs while promoting widespread adoption among developers, end users, and vendors. Central to CNCF's approach are principles of , where all contributions and decision-making occur transparently through processes to encourage broad participation. Community-driven development empowers contributors to guide project evolution, with minimal governance structures that allow self-sufficiency while offering guidance from the Technical Oversight Committee when needed. Sustainability is prioritized through rigorous technical reviews and long-term stewardship, ensuring projects remain viable and innovative. Additionally, CNCF emphasizes and portability, designing technologies to operate seamlessly across diverse cloud platforms and infrastructures, thereby reducing and enhancing ecosystem cohesion. Key cloud native technologies form the foundation for these principles: containers encapsulate applications for consistent deployment; decompose applications into independently deployable units for agility; service meshes manage secure communication and traffic between services; and observability tools, such as metrics, logs, and traces, provide visibility into system performance and health. CNCF operates as a project under the nonprofit , benefiting from its infrastructure while maintaining focused governance on cloud native initiatives.

Relationship with Linux Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) was established in 2015 as a project under the , serving as a neutral home for advancing technologies, such as and related standards. This structure positions CNCF as a collaborative initiative within the broader ecosystem, enabling it to foster innovation without while benefiting from the parent organization's established framework. CNCF leverages shared infrastructure from the , including legal protections against non-practicing entities (NPEs) through partnerships like Unified Patents, which provide defensive patent resources to safeguard projects. Additionally, the facilitates event hosting for CNCF's major conferences, such as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and supports funding mechanisms via membership dues that sustain project development and community activities. These resources allow CNCF to focus on technical advancement while the handles administrative and operational support, such as governance models and staff services. One key benefit of this relationship is access to the Linux Foundation's global network, which has helped CNCF attract over 800 members as of mid-2025, encompassing leading providers, software companies, and . Membership tiers—, , Silver, and —offer escalating levels of engagement, with benefits including training subscriptions, certification discounts, and influence on project direction, all enhanced by the Linux Foundation's associate membership perks. For instance, Silver members receive valued resources like educational coupons and brand visibility, while higher tiers provide board seats and expanded NPE defenses, driving widespread adoption of cloud native technologies. Despite these integrations, CNCF maintains operational independence in its technical decisions, with dedicated oversight committees guiding project incubation and , separate from the Linux Foundation's broader portfolio management. This balance ensures CNCF's mission to standardize cloud native practices remains agile and community-driven, while drawing on the Linux Foundation's proven for and credibility.

History

Founding

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) was announced on June 21, 2015, by the as a collaborative project aimed at creating a neutral governance body to advance cloud native technologies and foster alignment among container orchestration tools. This initiative responded to the rapid evolution of , spurred by Docker's open-source release in 2013, which had popularized lightweight, portable application deployment but highlighted the need for standardized practices to support scalable, microservices-based architectures across diverse environments. The foundation's early focus was on developing common technologies, reference architectures, and APIs to enable developers to build resilient, efficient cloud native applications while reducing fragmentation in the ecosystem. On July 21, 2015, Google donated Kubernetes version 1.0—its production-ready container orchestration system—to CNCF as the inaugural project, marking a pivotal step in the foundation's launch. Kubernetes, developed internally at Google to manage large-scale workloads, became the flagship effort to demonstrate CNCF's commitment to open-source innovation in elastic computing. The donation was supported by 22 founding members, including major technology firms such as Google, Red Hat, IBM, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, and Twitter, who committed resources to propel collaborative development. As part of its initial setup, CNCF established a technical charter outlining its scope for sustaining open-source projects and promoting cloud native principles, alongside forming the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) to oversee technical decisions, project incubation, and alignment with end-user needs. The TOC, comprising representatives from founding members, was tasked with guiding contributions and ensuring vendor-neutral progress, setting the groundwork for CNCF's role in standardizing practices like image specifications through partnerships such as the . This structure enabled the foundation to immediately begin accepting technical inputs, with serving as the seed for broader ecosystem growth.

Key Milestones

In 2016, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) expanded its portfolio beyond by accepting , an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, as its second hosted project on May 9. This marked the first addition following the donation of in 2015. Additionally, the introduction of the Container Runtime Interface (CRI) in version 1.5 enabled the integration of diverse container runtimes, broadening the ecosystem's compatibility and fostering interoperability among tools like runc and CRI-O. By 2018, CNCF achieved significant organizational growth, surpassing 100 members as part of a rapid expansion that saw the foundation cross the 200-member milestone in May during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe. A pivotal technical milestone occurred on March 6, when graduated to the CNCF's highest maturity level, signifying the handover of its operational control from to the broader community and affirming its stability for production use by thousands of organizations. From 2020 to 2022, CNCF experienced a surge in project graduations, including Envoy in 2018 and Jaeger in 2019, alongside further advancements like Helm, Harbor, Rook, and etcd in 2020, driven by accelerated cloud adoption during the that boosted demand for scalable, resilient infrastructure. This period also saw the launch of the Cloud Native White Paper in November 2020 by the CNCF Technical Interest Group, establishing foundational best practices for securing cloud native applications and evolving into ongoing security-focused reporting. In 2023 and 2024, CNCF's ecosystem matured further, reaching over 30 graduated projects by the end of 2024, reflecting sustained innovation and community contributions across networking, storage, and domains. The foundation integrated AI/ML-focused initiatives, including enhancements to for distributed application runtime that support AI workflows, such as improved and actor models for pipelines. Marking its 10th anniversary in 2025, CNCF hosted celebratory events, including the 10th anniversary edition of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in from November 10–13, gathering thousands to reflect on a decade of cloud native advancements. The mid-year project velocity report, released in July, highlighted continued growth with increased commits and contributors across CNCF projects, underscoring the ecosystem's vitality amid rising adoption of technologies like service meshes and tools. In late 2025, the foundation saw further graduations, including Knative on October 8 for serverless workloads and on November 6 for multi-cloud management, bringing the total to 33 graduated projects as of November 2025.

Governance and Organization

Structure and Decision-Making

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) operates under a hierarchical designed to balance technical innovation with business sustainability. At its core is the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), the primary technical governing body responsible for admitting new projects, overseeing their lifecycle from sandbox to graduated status, and maintaining the overall technical vision of the foundation. The TOC ensures neutrality and collaboration across projects by facilitating common practices and aligning interfaces. Complementing the TOC is the Governing Board, which handles non-technical matters such as marketing, business oversight, membership approvals, and funding decisions, convening 3-5 times annually to guide the foundation's strategic direction. Additionally, the End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB) provides expert guidance from an end-user perspective, reviewing reference architectures, offering usability feedback to projects, and amplifying non-vendor voices in technical discussions. Decision-making processes within CNCF emphasize community-driven maturity and consensus. The TOC manages project progression through defined stages—sandbox for experimental ideas, incubating for growing , and graduated for production-ready stability—based on criteria including technical maturity, active size (e.g., committers from at least two organizations), broad industry , and completion of independent security audits. For instance, graduated projects must demonstrate reliability for mainstream use and maintain a Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge. Voting in the TOC occurs primarily through gitvote or mailing list mechanisms, with each committee member holding one vote, often representing their member company or constituency, requiring a simple majority for approvals like project promotions. The Governing Board, meanwhile, approves the annual budget through formal resolutions, as seen in its review and of fiscal plans during quarterly meetings. CNCF's membership model is tiered to encourage participation at various scales, with benefits scaling by level. Platinum members, the highest tier, hold significant influence, including the right to appoint representatives to the Governing Board and participate in electing board seats, ensuring strategic input from major contributors. Gold and Silver tiers provide progressively fewer voting rights but still enable collaboration on technical direction, such as nominating candidates for TOC seats. To incorporate non-vendor perspectives, the End User TAB serves as an advisory council, elected from end-user member companies, focusing on practical adoption challenges without formal voting power in core decisions. CNCF operates as a project of the , which provides overarching legal and fiscal oversight. In 2025, CNCF introduced the Automated Governance Maturity Model, developed by the TAG Security working group, to systematically assess project and organizational security practices across categories like policy definition, evaluation, enforcement, and auditing. This model helps identify gaps in governance automation, promoting more robust, scalable cloud native ecosystems without altering core decision-making structures.

Leadership

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is led by key executives who guide its strategic direction and operational growth. Jonathan Bryce serves as the Executive Director, appointed in June 2025, where he focuses on expanding CNCF's global reach and integrating artificial intelligence into cloud native technologies to foster innovation and collaboration across ecosystems. Chris Aniszczyk acts as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), responsible for shaping the technical strategy and ensuring the long-term sustainability of CNCF projects through oversight of technical governance and community-driven advancements. Prior to Bryce's appointment, Priyanka Sharma held the role of from June 2020 to June 2025, during which she significantly expanded CNCF's membership to over 750 organizations and spearheaded diversity initiatives, including scholarships, inclusive naming efforts, and programs to support underrepresented groups in . The CNCF Governing Board comprises representatives from platinum members, including major cloud providers such as , AWS, and , ensuring balanced industry input on business and marketing decisions. Key figures on the board include Alena Prokharchyk from , who contributes expertise in cloud infrastructure architecture. In 2025, the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) expanded to incorporate end-user perspectives, with notable additions including Ahmed Bebars from , enhancing focus on practical adoption challenges, and Ben Somogyi from , bringing specialized expertise in DevSecOps and Kubernetes platform development for mission-critical applications to guide project evaluations and community feedback. These expansions support the governance structures that enable effective leadership by amplifying diverse voices in technical oversight.

Projects

Graduated Projects

Graduated projects represent the most mature stage in the CNCF lifecycle, where initiatives have demonstrated thriving adoption across diverse production environments, a structured process with active maintainers from at least three organizations, comprehensive documentation, and broad community commitment. These projects are deemed stable and ready for widespread enterprise use, having successfully completed the incubation phase that emphasizes growing ecosystems and reliability. Prominent examples include , the foundational container orchestration platform donated to CNCF in 2015 and graduated in March 2018, which automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications and supports millions of production deployments globally. , an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, joined CNCF in 2016 and graduated in August 2018, providing multidimensional for time-series metrics in cloud native stacks. Envoy, a high-performance service proxy for edge and service-to-service communication, graduated in November 2018 after demonstrating robust adoption in architectures. etcd, a distributed key-value store used for configuration and , was accepted in 2018 and graduated in November 2020, underpinning critical components like Kubernetes control planes. Jaeger, an end-to-end distributed tracing system, graduated in March 2019 to enable in complex environments. Cilium, leveraging for networking, , and , graduated in October 2023 with maintainers from seven companies and over 800 contributors. More recent graduations include Linkerd, a lightweight graduated in July 2021 for secure traffic management; Vitess, a database clustering system for horizontal scaling graduated in September 2021; Knative, a Kubernetes-based platform for serverless workloads graduated in October 2025; and , a framework for building portable cloud control planes graduated in November 2025. As of November 2025, CNCF hosts 34 graduated projects spanning categories like , , , and storage, reflecting the ecosystem's maturation. According to the CNCF's mid-year 2025 report on project velocity, these projects exhibit sustained contribution momentum, with leading in pull request activity driven by its role in powering vast-scale deployments.

Incubating and Sandbox Projects

The CNCF incubating stage represents projects that have progressed beyond initial experimentation, demonstrating growing communities, partial production adoption, and adherence to technical charter requirements. These projects exhibit stability suitable for broader testing while continuing to evolve toward graduation. For instance, OpenTelemetry, which entered the sandbox in 2019, advanced to incubating status in 2021 and focuses on unified for cloud native applications through data collection and processing. Similarly, KServe, incubating since 2020, enables scalable model serving on , supporting frameworks like and for inference workloads. Other notable incubating projects include Karmada, which facilitates multi-cluster orchestration for distributed applications since 2021, and Kyverno, a engine for security and compliance that joined incubation in 2020. Advancement from incubation to graduation requires meeting stringent criteria, including sustained , high code quality, and positive end-user feedback from production deployments. Projects in this stage must document successful real-world usage by multiple independent users, maintain active , and align with CNCF principles such as vendor neutrality. The sandbox stage serves as the entry point for innovative, early-stage projects exploring emerging cloud native ideas, often with limited production maturity but high potential for community growth. As of 2025, the CNCF hosts over 140 sandbox projects across categories like , networking, and . Examples include KAITO, accepted in late 2024, which provides Kubernetes-native support for AI/ML inference and tuning, including retrieval-augmented capabilities to enhance model . Another is , also added in 2024, designed to manage heterogeneous AI accelerators like GPUs and NPUs in Kubernetes clusters for efficient resource sharing in generative AI workloads. Additional recent entrants, such as Cartography for mapping IT dependencies with AI vendor integrations and Perses for dashboards, highlight experimental tools addressing complex ecosystem needs. In 2025, sandbox projects emphasize AI/ML integration, reflecting broader cloud native trends toward agentic workflows and edge-to-cloud computing, with at least a dozen new additions focused on these areas since mid-2024. Progression from sandbox to incubation demands demonstrating initial community traction, code maturity, and applicability to diverse cloud native use cases, evaluated by the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee.

Community and Events

Conferences and Meetups

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) organizes KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as its flagship annual conference series, bringing together developers, operators, and technologists to share advancements in cloud native technologies. Held multiple times a year across regions, the event features keynotes, breakout sessions, hands-on workshops, and an expo hall for networking and demonstrations. In 2025, the North America edition was held November 10-13 in Atlanta, Georgia, at the , which drew over 10,000 attendees, consistent with recent historical figures from similar events. The conference typically includes over 200 sessions covering topics such as AI integration in , security practices, and , with formats ranging from technical deep dives to interactive labs. Co-located events enhance the program, offering specialized tracks like Cloud Native Kubernetes Day and Istio Day on , fostering collaboration among project communities. Since 2020, CNCF has incorporated virtual attendance options to broaden global participation, alongside in-person gatherings. Regional editions of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon extend the flagship's reach, with the Europe event held April 1-4, 2025, in London, attracting nearly 12,500 participants focused on platform engineering and edge computing. The Asia-Pacific variant, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China on June 10-11, 2025, in Hong Kong, emphasizes local adoption of CNCF projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus. These gatherings promote knowledge sharing tailored to regional challenges, such as scalability in high-density environments. Specialized conferences complement the main events, including Open Source SecurityCon, co-hosted with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) on November 10, 2025, in . This one-day program highlights secure , featuring keynotes on and workshops on tools like Sigstore, included in KubeCon registration to encourage cross-community dialogue. Marking CNCF's 10th anniversary in 2025, the conference incorporated retrospective programming, such as keynotes on the evolution of cloud native ecosystems and ' decade-long impact, alongside celebratory sessions reflecting on milestones like the growth of graduated projects.

Working Groups and Ambassadors

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) maintains a network of Working Groups (WGs) and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to foster on specific aspects of the cloud native ecosystem, including security, diversity, and end-user guidance. These groups operate as decentralized, community-driven forums where contributors address targeted challenges, such as enhancing security practices through the SIG Security, which develops resources and best practices for secure cloud native architectures. Diversity efforts are advanced by the Deaf & Hard of Hearing Working Group, which promotes accessibility and inclusion in CNCF activities. For end-user perspectives, the End User Technical Advisory Board provides advice on practical adoption, ensuring projects align with real-world needs. A key example is SIG Apps, which focuses on the application lifecycle, covering development, deployment, and operations on to enable scalable management. In 2025, these groups have prioritized initiatives like strengthening feedback loops between end users and project maintainers, as outlined by the Technical Advisory Board (TAB), which emphasizes collecting user input to improve project health and relevance. This includes efforts within SIG Apps to refine deployment practices based on community observations of production challenges. The CNCF Ambassador program engages over 300 global representatives who act as local advocates, organizing meetups, providing mentorship to newcomers, and creating educational content to promote CNCF projects and broaden adoption. Ambassadors receive training and resources to lead community efforts, such as hosting regional events and contributing to project documentation, thereby extending CNCF's reach beyond core technical development. Community participation is guided by CNCF's , which enforces inclusive and respectful interactions across all activities, prohibiting harassment and promoting diversity. Contributions occur primarily through repositories for CNCF projects, where individuals can submit code, documentation, or issues following standardized paths outlined in project charters. Inclusivity initiatives, integrated into the code of conduct, include accessibility accommodations and anti-bias training to support a welcoming environment for all contributors. As part of 2025 evaluations, CNCF is reassessing Working Groups for impact and efficiency, including the completion of the Policy Working Group after fulfilling its mission on policy-related advancements. This process coincides with the launch of new end-user structures, such as the Contributor Program, which offers free access to forums, events, and advisory roles for active contributors, replacing the prior End User Supporter Program to enhance direct user influence without fees.

Impact and Adoption

Industry Influence

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) plays a pivotal role in standardizing cloud native technologies through its Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), which defines the technical vision, approves projects, and ensures consistent practices across the ecosystem. The TOC's charter outlines the core principles of cloud native computing, emphasizing containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs to empower scalable applications in dynamic environments. This framework has become the de facto reference for the industry, guiding development patterns and interoperability without relying on traditional standards bodies. CNCF's influence extends to the vendor ecosystem, where 728 members—including hyperscalers like (AWS), Cloud, and —adopt and integrate CNCF projects into their offerings. For instance, AWS provides Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), a managed service certified for Kubernetes conformance, enabling widespread deployment of containerized workloads. This adoption by major vendors fosters a unified landscape, reducing fragmentation and accelerating innovation in cloud infrastructure. Economically, CNCF underpins the expansion of the cloud native market, projected to reach $2.3 trillion by 2029 from $547 billion in 2022, by driving tools that optimize and . In 2025, CNCF welcomed 20 new silver members focused on AI and , such as Archestra.AI for agentic workflows and Cloudchipr for FinOps , reflecting growing investment in these areas; each silver membership delivers over $300,000 in annual value through resources like training and event access. Through strategic collaborations, CNCF advances security standards in partnership with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), co-hosting events like Open Source SecurityCon 2025 to address vulnerabilities and promote best practices. These efforts support secure agentic AI workflows by integrating security into cloud native pipelines, as seen in the influx of AI-focused members enhancing Kubernetes-based .

Surveys and Reports

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) produces key annual reports to track ecosystem trends, including the State of Cloud Native Development Q1 2025 edition, which draws on the 29th iteration of SlashData's Developer Nation survey of over 10,500 developers across 126 countries. This report notes stable container usage at 61% among backend developers, underscoring the maturity of core cloud native technologies. A separate CNCF survey of 689 IT professionals from early 2025 found that 80% of respondents indicated their organizations have deployed in production environments. Project-specific analyses include the State of Dapr 2025 report, which surveyed developers and found that 96% report time savings from using the Distributed Application Runtime, while 60% achieve productivity gains of 30% or more, particularly in and emerging AI-driven applications. Complementing this, the mid-year 2025 CNCF Open Source Project Velocity report analyzes data from July 2024 to July 2025, revealing robust commit growth across the top 30 projects; for instance, maintains the highest velocity, with select incubating projects like Meshery showing a 350% year-over-year increase in contributions, signaling accelerating . Key trends identified across these reports point to rising AI integration in cloud native workflows, with 52% of and AI developers leveraging for such workloads, alongside growing adoption of (IaC) and cloud optimization tools at 56%. Security remains a priority, with 33% of organizations focusing on and disaster recovery practices to enhance resilience. These insights are derived from large-scale developer surveys and automated metrics on activity combined with self-reported production usage, ensuring a blend of qualitative and quantitative data.

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