CNCF Hits Major Milestones with Global Community Growth, Record Industry Investment and a New Generation of Projects to Build AI Systems in Production

New Sandbox projects, including Agent Substrate and OpenShell, expand CNCF's portfolio to 231 projects as the community adds over 5.5 million cloud native developers in 12 months, welcomes eight Platinum memberships and brings together 82,000 attendees at events worldwide

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today highlighted a year of significant momentum, marked by new sandbox projects — including OpenShell and Agent Substrate — and milestones expanding open infrastructure for training AI models, scaling inference and securely operating autonomous agents. The announcement builds on continued member investment, a global cloud native developer population surpassing 21 million and technical progress across a foundation now spanning 231 projects.

In the past year, cloud native and CNCF events brought together 82,000 attendees globally at record-breaking events across more than 50 countries, while 32 new projects expanded the foundation's technology portfolio, including exciting new Sandbox Projects Agent Substrate and llm-d, as well as OpenShell secure runtimes for AI agents. That momentum extended with new Platinum members Adyen, Broadcom, CoreWeave, CVS, HAProxy, NVIDIA, OVHcloud and Vultr representing the chipmakers, neoclouds and enterprise users underpinning the next generation of AI infrastructure.

"AI teams need control over where their models run, what their agents can do, and how their systems behave in production," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of CNCF. "A year ago, we were talking about the opportunity in inference. Today, this community is building the infrastructure to train models, run inference and put agents to work with the security and scale production demands. We're bringing that work together in the open so developers retain choice across models, hardware and providers. Bring your hardest problems, contribute what you've learned and help us build what comes next."

OpenShell Brings Agent Runtime Security into Ecosystem Stewardship

OpenShell is joining CNCF as a Sandbox project, bringing the secure runtime for autonomous AI agents into vendor-neutral, ecosystem-led stewardship.

Spearheaded by NVIDIA, OpenShell governs how agents execute, which resources and data they can access and where inference requests are routed. It provides policy enforcement in the infrastructure surrounding an agent, helping organizations control access to files, networks, credentials and model endpoints as agents perform increasingly complex tasks and work at scale.

The contribution gives developers, platform teams and security practitioners a direct role in shaping the runtime foundation for AI and addresses the security, control and governance challenges that stand between experimentation and production.

An Expanding Foundation to Train, Infer and Act

CNCF project contributions announced today broaden the technologies available to organizations building AI infrastructure:

• Agent Substrate provides a zero-trust runtime for executing AI agents on Kubernetes while isolating untrusted code.
• gVisor strengthens workload isolation through a user-space kernel that limits exposure to the host operating system.
• KubeRay supports running and managing Ray workloads on Kubernetes for distributed computing, including AI training and inference.
• OpenRL brings Kubernetes-native orchestration to reinforcement learning, helping teams coordinate the compute required for model post-training.
• OpenShell adds runtime governance and policy enforcement for autonomous agents.

These projects build on substantial AI progress over the last twelve months:

• Distributed inference: llm-d joined CNCF and reached its 1.0 release, advancing an open framework for deploying and scaling distributed large language model inference.
• AI lifecycle maturity: Kubeflow graduated, recognizing the maturity of its ecosystem for data processing, model training, fine-tuning and serving.
• Accelerator efficiency: HAMi advanced to incubation, supporting the sharing and scheduling of heterogeneous accelerators on Kubernetes.
• Infrastructure capabilities: Kubernetes advanced workload-aware scheduling and Dynamic Resource Allocation, improving how complex AI workloads coordinate, compute and access specialized hardware.
• Interoperability: The Kubernetes AI Conformance Program reached 40 certified platforms driving community-led requirements for consistent AI infrastructure.

Across the wider portfolio, Cloud Native Buildpacks, Karmada, Kubeflow, KubeVirt, NATS and OpenTelemetry also reached graduation, while CloudNativePG, K8gb, Meshery, and Open Cluster Management advanced to incubation. Together, these milestones strengthen the application delivery, orchestration, messaging, data and operational infrastructure on which production systems depend.

A Global Community Building What Comes Next

In 2026, the global cloud native developer community reached 21.2 million, while cloud native and CNCF events brought together 82,000 attendees across more than 50 countries. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe set a new CNCF attendance record with nearly 13,500 attendees, alongside Kubernetes Community Days, meetups and specialized gatherings connecting practitioners worldwide.

That growth is expanding the community's reach and shared expertise. CNCF welcomed 58 new Ambassadors and added 28 Cloud Native Community Groups, creating more opportunities for local participation. Community members also published 40 new cloud native case studies and 12 reference architectures, turning production experience into practical guidance others can build on.

Build the Future of Cloud and AI

"The people who built Kubernetes are now working side by side with a new wave of contributors focused on inference, training and agents, and you can see it in our project and contributor growth," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. "AI workloads are landing on cloud native infrastructure and the patterns for scaling them are being defined in CNCF projects right now. If you're a developer who wants to shape how AI runs in production, this is the moment to get involved."

Looking ahead, CNCF also plans to introduce two additional AI focused certifications in 2027: Kubernetes AI Associate (KAIA) and Certified Kubernetes Inference Engineer (CKIE). These upcoming credentials will further expand CNCF's training and certification portfolio as AI and cloud native technologies continue to converge.

CNCF invites developers, end users and technology providers to build the next era of cloud and AI: contribute code, share production experience, join community groups and invest in the projects global organizations depend on.

The challenges of running AI in production are already here. Bring your toughest problems - and your expertise - to the community building the solutions.

Additional Resources

• Explore CNCF projects: https://www.cncf.io/projects/
• Contribute to CNCF projects: https://contribute.cncf.io/
• Join CNCF: https://www.cncf.io/about/join/

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private and hybrid clouds. CNCF hosts critical components of global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy. CNCF brings together developers, end users and vendors to build sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software and is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, visit www.cncf.io.

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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation