Welcome to the May 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter.
We didn't send out an edition in April due to the volume of other staff messages sent to the maintainer mailing lists.
We look forward to seeing many of you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India next month!
CNCF staff will be at the various maintainer-focused activities on June 18-19.
CNCF staff will soon begin rolling out a new repository called
.project
into project GitHub organizations. If you see a new repo appear, do not be
alarmed: this is expected, and there is no action required from maintainers for
the initial rollout.
The short version is that
.project
is a standardized metadata repository for CNCF projects. It gives each project
a clear, machine-readable home for information like project details,
repositories, maintainers, governance references, security contacts, and other
metadata that CNCF systems rely on.
As CNCF projects grow, maintainers increasingly spend time answering repetitive technical questions across Slack, Discord, and GitHub issues - often the same questions, many of them already answered in documentation.
High-traffic projects like OpenTelemetry and Envoy Gateway have been using Kapa.ai to handle thousands of community questions per month, reducing the volume of inbound support questions maintainers handle directly.
CNCF has partnered with Kapa.ai to provide AI-powered documentation assistants to hosted projects at no cost.
Welcome to the March 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter. We hope you’re excited for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam in a few days!
CNCF staff will be at the Maintainer Summit and the Project Pavilion throughout the week. Please find us if you have any questions about support for your projects.
Late last year, we announced the strategic agreement with GitHub to provide GitHub Copilot Enterprise licenses to CNCF project maintainers at no cost. Since then, we have seen a strong response from the community, with over 100 Enterprise seats already in active use.
As we move forward, we are working to simplify our infrastructure and billing. To that end, we will be phasing out all legacy GitHub Copilot Business licenses in early April 2026.
Welcome to the February 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter.
We hope you’re excited for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe and plan to attend the Maintainer Summit!
You can learn more about the event and other worldwide KubeCon + CloudNativeCon opportunities in this month’s newsletter.
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!
Last year, the CNCF and Docker announced an expanded partnership through the Docker Sponsored Open Source (DSOS) Program to increase infrastructure and tooling support available to CNCF project maintainers. Since then, Docker has made Docker Hardened Images (DHI) freely available to all developers.
We are highlighting this update for the benefit of the CNCF maintainer community, as DHI can be used by CNCF projects as a secure and transparent foundation for shipping container images.
Maintaining a CNCF project involves managing critical infrastructure at scale, including publishing trusted images and ensuring dependencies remain secure. To support these efforts, the CNCF-Docker partnership (announced in 2025) enables CNCF projects to access Docker's Sponsored Open Source (DSOS) program. DSOS provides essential infrastructure and security tools specifically for non-commercial open-source maintainers.
Here is what you need to know about the benefits, eligibility, and how to apply.