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Reducing the Support Tax: CNCF Partners with Kapa.ai to Help Project Maintainers

· 3 min read
Ihor Dvoretskyi
Ihor Dvoretskyi
Senior Developer Advocate

If you're a maintainer of a growing CNCF project, you know the "support tax" well. As your community grows, so does the volume of repetitive technical questions across Slack, Discord, and GitHub issues. This often pulls maintainers away from what they do best: writing code and building features.

That's why some high-traffic CNCF projects like OpenTelemetry and Envoy Gateway have already turned to Kapa.ai for help. Both projects are using Kapa to handle thousands of community questions every month, freeing up their maintainers to focus on what matters most.

The CNCF is pleased to announce a partnership with Kapa.ai. Through this collaboration, CNCF-hosted projects can now access Kapa.ai's AI-powered technical assistants for free.

OpenTelemetry's Kapa.ai AI Assistant

What is Kapa.ai?​

Kapa.ai helps technical communities build AI assistants that work for complex products. Unlike a general-purpose LLM that might guess when it doesn't know an answer, Kapa uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to ground its responses in your project's specific documentation and knowledge base.

It can ingest multiple sources, including your project's:

  • Documentation
  • Source code
  • GitHub issues and discussions
  • Slack and Discord archives
  • Technical files and Stack Overflow answers

The result is a dedicated AI assistant that can be embedded directly into your documentation site, installed as a bot in your community chat, or deployed as a pre-built hosted MCP server directly in your developers' IDEs.

How This Helps Maintainers​

This isn't just about answering user questions — it's about improving your project's health by:

  • Identifying documentation gaps: Kapa tracks when it can't answer a question because the information simply isn't in your docs. This gives you a clear roadmap of exactly what needs to be written.
  • Giving reliable answers: By grounding the AI in your specific knowledge base, it significantly reduces the "hallucinations" common in general AI tools.
  • Scaling your time: High-traffic projects like OpenTelemetry and Envoy Gateway are already using Kapa to handle common queries, allowing maintainers to focus on core technical debt and new features.

A Note on Data Privacy​

Data Privacy

Kapa does not use your project's question/answer data for anything — no training of underlying models or any other purposes. Your community's data remains your own, used only to power your project's specific assistant and give you insights.

Data privacy is a priority for CNCF communities. One of the primary reasons for this partnership is Kapa.ai's commitment to data integrity.

Get it for Your Project​

Available to All CNCF Projects

Whether you're in the Sandbox, Incubating, or Graduated phase — if you're struggling to keep up with community questions, this tool is designed to give you some of your time back.

If your project is part of the CNCF, you can apply for free access to Kapa.ai directly through the CNCF Service Desk. The qualification process has been simplified in collaboration with the Kapa.ai team, mirroring the experience launched with the Docker partnership.

Next steps for maintainers:

  1. Head over to the CNCF Service Desk.
  2. Submit a request for Kapa.ai access.
  3. The CNCF Projects team will work with you to ingest your knowledge base and deploy your bot.

References​