Planning a major update, new feature, or milestone to align with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 (March 23–26)? The CNCF PR team can help amplify your news.
Announcements will be:
Welcome to the January 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter.
In 2025 we saw continued project growth, with the TOC accepting an additional six projects to close out the year. The speed at which projects join the CNCF and advance through levels has improved thanks to better processes, and we've expanded the variety of services available to maintainers through new partnerships with providers. We are committed to serving our 2,000+ maintainers and 300,000+ contributors even better in 2026.
Please take a moment to complete the 2H 2025 Maintainer Survey. Your feedback is vital for us to serve you better this year. The survey will close on January 30th, so please respond as soon as you can!
Welcome to the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) December 2025 (Year End Edition).
It's been an amazing 2025 with record project growth, improvements in the speed that projects join the CNCF and move levels, and the breadth of new services we've made available to maintainers.
We look forward to helping your projects make an even greater impact in 2026.
And please take the 2H 2025 Maintainer Survey when you have a chance. It will help us serve you better in the coming year.
Thank you, we hope you enjoy the end of year downtime and we wish you the best in the new year!
CFPs and the Project Opportunities Interest Form for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 are closing soon! CFP for Maintainer Track, Contribfest, and Project Lightning Talks closes on Sunday, 14 December, and the Kiosk + PR Interest Form closes on Wednesday, 17 December, both at 23:59 local time.
Planning to speak at the Maintainer Summit? Be sure to submit your CFP by Sunday, 14 December at 23:59 local time.
Please visit the Project Opportunities page to learn more about the benefits, deadlines, how to sign up, and more.
Kindly note that due to high demand, space is limited and there is a high possibility that not all projects will be able to participate as we are not able to accept all requests.
Greetings maintainers! We have some exciting updates about resources newly available to you and your projects.
And please make sure to take the maintainer survey! This is your chance to tell us how we're doing, gauge your understanding of the benefits of hosting a project at the CNCF, and influence our priorities in 2026.
Help us help you: maintainers-survey.cncf.io
We are excited to announce an expanded partnership with GitHub to provide free Copilot Enterprise licenses to CNCF project maintainers. This benefit is part of a limited pilot program and will be rolling out in the coming weeks. Eligibility will be validated against the list at maintainers.cncf.io, so please ensure your project's information is up to date.
Through the Docker Sponsored Open Source Program, project maintainers gain access to upgraded registry, security, and support services. These include unlimited Docker Hub image pulls, sponsored OSS status, Docker Scout for vulnerability analysis, automated image builds, usage metrics, and streamlined support. Request access via the Service Desk.
Akamai pledged $700K in cloud credits to the CNCF for project use. Projects can now request access to onboard Linode. This platform provides another alternative to Equinix which is due to sunset later this year. Oracle Cloud credits also continue to be available, particularly for AI workloads on ARM and bare metal deployments. Request access to either service via the Service Desk.
The latest version of Insights was launched at Open Source Summit in June. You can get deeper context on the health of your project by analyzing its velocity, contributor dependency, and organizational reliance. You can also add a badge to your repos, embed charts in your READMEs and presentations. If you see any data issues (such as new repos not onboarded or other missing data, you can open up issues on the Insights GitHub repo. Check it out!
The CNCF has moved its community calendar to PCC which now enables maintainers to publish and update their own entries on the CNCF community calendar. This eliminates a project and staff bottleneck as entries were previously handled as Service Desk tickets. PCC also recently added an often-requested feature: the automatic upload of project meetings to the project's designated YouTube channel. Projects have control over any video changes before publication.
ask.cncf.io is an AI assistant built with Dosu designed to answer questions about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem, including projects, governance, events, and contributor information. This is not a general LLM chatbot. It only contains information from official repositories and documentation across the CNCF. Give it a try and come back often to see how it improves over time.
We've relaunched the contribute.cncf.io site 🎉. This site serves as the primary place for maintainers to learn about what benefits they have as a CNCF project and helps expand our funnel of new maintainers for your projects. You can also submit pull requests to improve content.
Help us help you: maintainers-survey.cncf.io
See you at Maintainer Summit and have a great rest of your KubeCon NA in Atlanta!
Greeting maintainers! We have a few things that need your attention in order to get us in the mindset for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA. The first is taking the time to recognize our peers for their outstanding work in 2025. The second item is making sure our swag is as awesome as you are. Third, submit your Maintainer Summit CFP talks!
Deadline Summary
Contributor Awards 2025
In previous years, the Kubernetes community recognized contributors who have gone above and beyond with the annual Kubernetes Contributor Awards. With the creation of a Maintainer Summit, we want to expand this to all graduated projects! All graduated projects will now be able to nominate contributors to receive a physical award, usually in the form of a square canvas print. Projects may only submit for awards once per calendar year. That means if a project submits for Maintainer Summit EU 2026, they cannot submit again for NA 2026.
Nominations
Graduated projects will be nominating individuals for the awards. Projects must submit nominations by August 15th! This is a way to highlight individuals who have had a major impact on your project and exemplify the values of our communities.
Please nominate contributors doing outstanding work in your projects by filling out this form. The deadline for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA (Atlanta) is August 15th!
KubeCon NA Maintainer Summit T-Shirt Design
It’s time to flex that creative muscle! For this Maintainer Summit we want to solicit designs for our attendee t-shirts! Anyone eligible to attend the maintainer summit can submit art ideas, and the designs will be chosen by this summit’s program chairs.
Design submissions should follow these guidelines:
The deadline to submit is August 8th, and the winner will be chosen and informed August 12th.
Submit your awesome T-Shirt designs by filling out this form.
KubeCon NA Maintainer Summit CFP
This one is pretty self explanatory. The CFP closes EOD Monday, July 21st. If you haven’t submitted a talk, and want to, now’s the time to panic and pull something together!
Thank you!
The Linux Foundation has announced a certification policy change effective 2024. This update includes revisions to exam eligibility requirements and a new retake policy, providing candidates with greater flexibility and support. These changes are part of the Linux Foundation's commitment to maintaining the integrity and relevance of its certification programs within the evolving landscape of technology.
There’s a lot of news this month around resources provided to projects! Please read as your project may be impacted or could benefit from this news:
Oracle has kindly donated $3 million in OCI credits for CNCF projects. These credits are now available for all CNCF projects, and we encourage you to investigate adding OCI to your CI/CD pipelines. Check out this blog post for more information!
The folks at Equinix have asked us to remind projects using their resources that they are bare metal! That means that any machines you have that sit idle, or even off, are still taking up resources and burning carbon for no reason. Equinix and CNCF Staff are double-checking that all the usage is valid and that resources are not stale/orphaned.
If you have an Equinix footprint, please take a few minutes and ensure the machines your project is using are what is needed. Doing so will also get you ahead of the game on the policy changes mentioned above. If you have any Equinix-specific questions or want help right-sizing machines, don’t hesitate to reach out to (equinix@cncf.io).
To be good stewards of the resources donated to us by various providers, we CNCF folks need to change how we’re handing out and monitoring project usage of cloud/provider resources. To that end, we’ve written a policy around projects requesting and using compute resources.
CNCF will have hosted GHA Runners for you to use across all our major providers. If a provider/architecture/shape doesn’t exist, please contact CNCF staff, and we will add it. Unless there are extenuating circumstances, you should shape your CI to work within GitHub Actions. Resources just for CI/CD must be re-requested and approved by CNCF Staff. Non-ephemeral resources need to be re-requested every six months. At seven months, those resources are subject to deletion. This will go into effect in September 2024, with staff reaching out to projects over the coming months to discuss their usage and identify a path forward
Note from Jeefy: These changes are definitely a departure from how things have normally been handled, and it will also be a big lift from some projects. But we’ve also grown past what we can manage “the old way.” This gives us a much more sustainable model across the board. Thanks for helping us and your fellow projects out.
The CNCF team has been working on supplementing the provided GitHub runners with hosted runners within our various providers. If your project is part of the CNCF’s GitHub Enterprise account, you should already have access to some. Example below:
To use these runners, see the syntax provided by GitHub and use the name of the runner provided (ex. equinix-4cpu-16gb). We will be adding different types of runners over the next few months. If you would like any specific shape, size, or vendor platform, please reach out to us in ServiceDesk and we’ll get it running ASAP!
LFX is piloting a new tool for maintainers to learn about community growth trends and project velocity trends. Many early adopters have already boarded Insights, and we invite you to join them. Getting added to Insights is similar to configuring the DCO bot on your GitHub organization and activating it for one or more repos. Learn more about Insights v3 here and contact Daniel Krook on Slack to start onboarding now.
Scarf is now available to CNCF projects to learn about the adoption patterns of their projects through anonymized usage metrics. The Linux Foundation has partnered with Scarf to provide projects with licenses for their entire team, as well as hands-on support from Scarf. Learn more about using Scarf here.
Participate in the CNCF Sustainability Survey to help shape the future of sustainability practices within cloud-native computing. Your input will contribute to developing environmentally conscious solutions in the CNCF ecosystem.
On the last Wednesday of each month, the TechDocs team hosts Open Office Hours for anyone to drop in with questions about technical documentation. Our next session will be on Feb 28, 2024, at 8:00 AM PST. You can find details on how to join us on the public calendar. Hope to see you there!
CNCF has been accepted as a mentoring organization for 2024 🎉 Thanks everyone for all your support and proposals! See the whole list of accepted mentoring organizations at (https://g.co/gsoc).
Now we’ve been accepted as an org, feel free to update or add any project proposals up until March 11 when we make our request for project slots.
Here are the upcoming deadlines for CFPs:
Want to contribute to March's newsletter? Contribute Today!
The schedule is LIVE for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024! 🎁 If you’re not yet registered to join us in Paris, France from 19-22 March, get a move on. 🏃
This epic event has everything you need: talks from experts, news, and tech from the best vendors, a hackathon, more than a dozen co-located events, parties, swag, and all the networking you can handle with the best in the industry! Join us.
For KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU, we will limit the project updates on the keynote stage exclusively to Graduated projects + Kubernetes SIGs.
Incubating projects will still be able to provide updates at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU on our new Lightning Talk stage with the option to provide live or pre-recorded updates.
All updates provided at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU will be showcased throughout the event on monitors displayed in our Project Pavilion.
Please submit your video and slide deck by Friday, January 25, in order to be considered.
LFX Mentorship The LFX Mentorship 2024 Term 01: March - May is open now open for project ideas: https://github.com/cncf/mentoring/tree/main/programs/lfx-mentorship/2024/01-Mar-May
Project submission and application timeline:
Google Summer of Code 20 This is Google Summer of Code’s 20th Year 🎉 CNCF has been participating in the Google Summer of Code for a few years, and now we are excited to apply and join the 2024 program cycle with them!
All CNCF projects are eligible to apply to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Please start thinking about project ideas and submit them via pull request: https://github.com/cncf/mentoring/blob/main/programs/summerofcode/2024.md#ideas
This year, GSoC is looking to have more AI/ML projects in particular, so please share any open source AI/ML projects that you’re thinking of doing.
The deadline to submit project ideas is March 11, 2024.
Google Summer of Code 2024 Timeline
On the last Wednesday of each month, the TechDocs team hosts Open Office Hours for anyone to drop in with questions about technical documentation. Our next session will be on Jan 31, 2024, at 8:00 AM PST. You can find details on how to join us on the public calendar. Hope to see you there!
Here are the upcoming deadlines for CFPs:
Want to contribute to February's newsletter? Contribute Today!
We invite CNCF Chairs of TAGs and Kubernetes SIGs working groups and Maintainers from graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects to participate in the below project opportunities:
We are thrilled to share some fantastic news about our revamped project offerings for 2024, shaped by insightful feedback from our projects and community.:
Please submit your interest form by Wednesday, 17 January.
For KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU, we will limit the project updates on the keynote stage exclusively to Graduated projects + Kubernetes SIGs.
Incubating projects will still be able to provide updates at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU on our new Lightning Talk stage with the option to provide live or pre-recorded updates.
All updates provided at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU will be showcased throughout the event on monitors displayed in our Project Pavilion.
Please submit your video and slide deck by Thursday, January 25, in order to be considered.
The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe hotel blocks are OPEN! We're working with an official hotel partner, bnetwork, to give you a hassle-free way to get the best rates in Paris. Book your hotel room for the event before blocks begin to sell out!
The LFX Mentorship 2024 Term 01 March—May call for proposals opens January 8, 2024 (opening early due to popular demand!) Project submission and application timeline:
We’re excited to announce a new conference as a part of Open Source Summit starting in NA in 2024: TechDocsCon 😃
TechDocsCon is for those interested in best practices for open source project documentation processes and communication. This event serves as a platform for sharing real-world experiences, exploring the impact of documentation on project success, measuring its effectiveness, and delving into what works and what doesn't.
CFPs are open now and close on January 14, 2024.
Here are the upcoming deadlines for CFPs:
Want to contribute to January's newsletter? Contribute Today!
A friendly nudge: we're still eagerly awaiting your valuable input! Our survey is open for a limited time, and we'd love to hear from you. Your insights play a crucial role in shaping our path forward. Take a moment to share your thoughts and help us create an even better experience for you.
Were you at KubeCon+ CloudNativeCon NA 2023? Do you have any feedback to make the event better OR do you want to gush at the Events team? For each KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, we’ve been collecting community feedback from a subset of folks, but we’d like to open it up to the entire maintainer community.
Your input matters! We want to ensure our project opportunities at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon fit your needs. Participate in our Project Opportunities Survey and have your say in shaping future initiatives! We welcome you to share your insights and thoughts on potential project offerings for future events.
Following the impact of the 2023 Cloud Native Security Slam, the Kubernetes maintainers have scheduled a one-day special event to allow new Kubernetes contributors an easy path to helping commit critical security improvements to Kubernetes. Whether you are joining for one day or would like to become a recurring contributor, this is a perfect opportunity to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes to make Kubernetes the global digital superpower it has become.
In case you missed it, exciting news broke this fall regarding projects under the CNCF GitHub Enterprise License. Now, you should have access to the latest GitHub Action Runner type. Check out GitHub's fantastic blog announcement for detailed instructions on setup and more information.
In the upcoming months, native Linux ARM GitHub Action runners will be available. Keep an eye out for further updates!
Here are the upcoming deadlines for CFPs:
Want to contribute to December's newsletter? Contribute Today!