CNCF Launches Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program to Standardize AI Workloads on Kubernetes

New initiative targets cloud native AI portability and reliability across environments

Key Highlights

• CNCF and the Kubernetes open source community are launching the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program to create open, community-defined standards for running AI workloads on Kubernetes.
• As organizations increasingly move AI workloads into production, they need consistent and interoperable infrastructure. This initiative helps reduce fragmentation and ensures reliability across environments.
• Platform vendors, infrastructure teams, enterprise AI practitioners, and open source contributors in Kubernetes and across the cloud native ecosystem need a common foundation for seeking interoperable and production-ready AI deployments.
• The program is now available and being developed in the open to encourage broader participation.

ATLANTA, Nov. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- KUBECON + CLOUDNATIVECON NORTH AMERICA - The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the launch of the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. The new program introduces a community-led effort to define and validate standards for running AI workloads reliably and consistently on Kubernetes.

The program outlines a minimum set of capabilities and configurations required to run widely used AI and machine learning frameworks on Kubernetes. The initiative seeks to give enterprises confidence in deploying AI on Kubernetes while providing vendors a common baseline for compatibility.

Announced in its beta phase at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan in June, the Kubernetes AI Conformance Program has successfully certified its initial participants with a v1.0 release and has started to work on a roadmap for a v2.0 release next year.

The growing use of Kubernetes for AI workloads highlights the importance of common standards. According to Linux Foundation Research on Sovereign AI, 82% of organizations are already building custom AI solutions, and 58% use Kubernetes to support those workloads. With 90% of enterprises identifying open source software as critical to their AI strategies, the risk of fragmentation, inefficiencies, and inconsistent performance is rising. The Certified AI Platform Conformance Program responds directly to this need by providing shared standards for AI on Kubernetes.

"As AI in production continues to scale and take advantage of multiple clouds and systems, teams need consistent infrastructure they can rely on," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. "This conformance program will create shared criteria to ensure AI workloads behave predictably across environments. It builds on the same successful community-driven process we've used with Kubernetes to help bring consistency across over 100+ Kubernetes systems as AI adoption scales."

The Certified Kubernetes AI Platform Conformance Program builds on CNCF's ongoing efforts to support work that ensures consistency and portability in cloud native environments as AI adoption accelerates. It draws from CNCF's established Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program, which brought together more than 100 certified distributions and platforms across every major cloud, on-premises solution, and vendor offering. The Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program has been instrumental in making Kubernetes a reliable and interoperable solution across the industry.

This new initiative sees CNCF applying its proven model to AI infrastructure. The goal is to reduce confusion and inconsistency by setting clear requirements for running AI tasks that follow Kubernetes principles, using open, standard APIs and interfaces. By creating clear standards, testing for compliance, and building agreement within the community, CNCF aims to speed up the use of AI while also reducing risks. This approach mirrors the successful strategy employed for Kubernetes, now adapted for the rapidly advancing domain of AI.

Supporting Quotes

"Responsible AI depends on clear, trusted standards. They're what turn innovation into something scalable and real. This certification gives enterprises confidence in deploying AI on Kubernetes and provides vendors a unified framework to ensure their solutions work together. Building on that foundation, Akamai's Kubernetes-native platform on the Akamai Inference Cloud supports everything from DIY to fully managed cloud-to-edge deployments and turns those standards into production-ready infrastructure built to handle the scale and speed AI inference demands."

—Alex Chircop, chief architect, Akamai

"The Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program is exactly the kind of community-driven standardization effort that helps move the industry forward. At AWS, we've long believed that standards are the foundation for true innovation and interoperability—and this is especially critical as customers increasingly scale AI workloads into production. In achieving AI Conformance certification for Amazon EKS, we're demonstrating our commitment to providing customers with a verified, standardized platform for running AI workloads on Kubernetes. This certification validates our comprehensive AI capabilities, including built-in resource management for GPUs, support for distributed AI workload scheduling, intelligent cluster scaling for accelerators, and integrated monitoring for AI infrastructure.  AWS is proud to help establish a foundation for reliable and interoperable AI infrastructure that organizations of all sizes can build upon with confidence. We look forward to contributing to this important initiative."

— Eswar Bala, director of container services, AWS 

"Broadcom is excited to announce that  VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) is now a Certified Kubernetes AI Conformant Platform. This milestone reinforces our commitment to open standards and helps customers innovate freely, knowing their AI platforms are built on a consistent, interoperable foundation. It's another example of how Broadcom continues to contribute across the CNCF ecosystem to accelerate community-driven innovation."

—Dilpreet Bindra, senior director, engineering, VMware Cloud Foundation Division at Broadcom

"This initiative marks an important step forward for the AI ecosystem, aligning the community around shared standards that make deploying AI at scale more consistent and reliable. At CoreWeave, Kubernetes has always been central to how we build. Its flexibility and scalability are what make it possible to deliver the performance and reliability modern AI demands. We're excited about this milestone —it reflects what we value most: openness, performance, and enabling developers to spend more time innovating."

—Chen Goldberg, senior vice president, engineering, CoreWeave

"One of our core beliefs at Giant Swarm is empowering end users through open source and community standards. The Kubernetes AI Conformance Program is one of the most timely standardization efforts of the last 10 years. With demand at its peak it is important for end users to be able to rely on standardized platforms to become successful with their AI investments."

—Puja Abbassi, VP product at Giant Swarm

"Google Cloud has certified for Kubernetes AI Conformance because we believe consistency and portability are essential for scaling AI. By aligning with this standard early, we're making it easier for developers and enterprises to build AI applications that are production-ready, portable, and efficient—without reinventing infrastructure for every deployment."

—Jago Macleod, Kubernetes & GKE engineering director at Google Cloud

"The future of AI will be built on open standards, not walled gardens. This conformance program is the foundation for that future, ensuring a level playing field where innovation and portability win."

—Sebastian Scheele CEO & co-founder of Kubermatic

"AI is transforming every industry, and Kubernetes is at the center of this shift. The new Kubernetes AI Conformance Program gives customers confidence that providers can run AI workloads reliably in production. Microsoft Azure is pleased to help direct this effort, ensuring Kubernetes delivers the portability, security, and performance businesses need to innovate with AI at scale."

—Brendan Burns, corporate vice president, cloud-native compute at Microsoft and co-creator of Kubernetes

At Oracle, we see open standards as critical for sustainable and scalable AI innovation. The AI/ML space is dynamic, and our users are looking for consistency. By supporting Kubernetes AI Conformance, we're helping to reduce fragmentation of architectures and technologies to ensure developers and enterprises have a foundation to run production-ready AI/ML workloads reliably and efficiently."

—Sudha Raghavan, senior vice president, AI Infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and CNCF board member

"Red Hat has always believed that open standards are the key to true enterprise adoption. The Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program extends the existing Kubernetes conformance to meet the complex demands of AI/ML workloads. This community-driven standard is essential to preventing vendor lock-in and helping ensure that the AI workloads our customers deploy using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift AI are truly portable, reliable, and production-ready, whether they run on-premises, across multiple public clouds, or at the edge."

—Yuan Tang, senior principal software engineer, Red Hat and co-chair of Kubernetes AI Conformance Working Group

"Conformance is a critical component of an open ecosystem because it allows any company to create compatible software to democratize access to new technologies. Sidero Labs is excited to participate in the Kubernetes AI Conformance program to enable companies large and small to own their critical AI infrastructure."

—Justin Garrison, head of product, Sidero Labs

The Certified Kubernetes AI Platform Conformance Program is being developed in the open at github.com/cncf/ai-conformance and is guided by the Working Group AI Conformance. The group, operating under an openly published charter, is focused on creating a conformance standard and validation suite to ensure AI workloads on Kubernetes are interoperable, reproducible, and portable. Its scope includes defining a reference architecture, framework support requirements, and test criteria for key capabilities such as GPU integration, volume handling, and job-level networking.

For more context on the initiative's objectives, see the Kubernetes AI Conformance planning document.

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. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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SOURCE CNCF