Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) December 2025 (Year End Edition)
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!
- ✍️ Please take the Maintainer Survey
- 🚲 Upcoming project opportunity deadline (TODAY!)
- 🎥 Maintainer Summit recordings available
- 🚀 New contribute.cncf.io launched
- 📄 Call for Kubernetes AI Conformance applications and reference architectures
- 🧑🎓 CNCF LFX 2026 Term 1 call for proposals open soon
- 🔑 Google Summer of Code 2026 opportunities
- 🤖 GitHub Copilot guidance
- 🕵️ Kusari Inspector free for projects
- 🐳 Docker Hardened Images free for projects
- 📈 Telemetry collection and privacy guidelines
- 🙏 Please take the Maintainer Survey
- 🎉 Thank you for an amazing year
✍️ Please take the Maintainer Survey
To help guide the CNCF's efforts in supporting our projects we regularly collect feedback from maintainers on their experience at the CNCF. Please help us help you by filling out the 2H25 edition of the CNCF Maintainers 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. It should take no more than a couple of minutes of your time. Thanks in advance!
🚲 Upcoming project opportunity deadline (TODAY!)
We notified projects about KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 opportunities last week. The CFP for Maintainer Track, Contribfest, and Project Lightning Talks closed on Sunday, 14 December, but the Kiosk + PR Interest Form closes on Wednesday, 17 December, at 23:59 local time. Get your requests in today!
🎥 Maintainer Summit recordings available
The YouTube playlist for the Maintainer Summit at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America is now available. We look forward to seeing you again in Amsterdam 🚲
🚀 New contribute.cncf.io launched
We've relaunched contribute.cncf.io 🎉. 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 contributors to your projects. You can also open issues and submit pull requests to improve content.
We've also launched a blog on the site. It's where you'll find our monthly newsletter going forward. And if you missed it, you can check out the Maintainer Summit announcement post with updates about new code assistants, cloud credits, image registries, the ask.cncf.io chatbot, and LFX tools.
📄 Call for Kubernetes AI Conformance applications and reference architectures
Earlier this year, the Kubernetes AI Conformance program officially launched and the interest and response has been overwhelming! Many thanks to our initial batch of contributors and conformance program participants.
With Kubernetes 1.35 launching soon (already?) it's a perfect time to submit your K8s AI Conformance application here.
Willing to talk about your use of Cloud Native projects in the AI training and inference space? We'd love to hear from you! Please email projects@cncf.io
🧑🎓 CNCF LFX 2026 Term 1 call for proposals open soon
LFX Mentorship 2026 Term 1 March - May is opening early next year for project ideas! Since 2020, 25 LFX mentee alumni have gone on to become CNCF project maintainers. This is a great opportunity to grow your contributor community.
Project submission and application timeline:
- Project proposal period: Jan 7 - Jan 20, 2026
- Mentee applications open: Jan 26 - Feb 10, 2026
- Term begins: March 2, 2026
We're looking forward to seeing all your project ideas!
🔑 Google Summer of Code 2026 opportunities
CNCF is planning on being a Mentoring Organization again next year for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and can help projects looking to participate in the program. This is a fantastic opportunity to increase your project's contributor community and get valuable work done!
Next year, GSoC is actively looking to bring in more projects in the areas of Security and AI/ML.
Key dates:
- Organizations application period: Monday, Jan 19, to Tuesday, Feb 3, 2026
- CNCF Project proposals submissions recommendation: Wednesday Jan 14, 2026
- Note, proposals can still be submitted after this recommended date, but the Mentorship team needs time to evaluate the proposals and package our application. The more proposals we have, the stronger our org application will be.
🤖 GitHub Copilot guidance
We are excited to officially roll out GitHub Copilot Enterprise to CNCF project maintainers!
🕵️ Kusari Inspector free for projects
We have another tool for our utility belt! To help us continue to improve shipping more secure projects faster, Kusari has graciously offered all CNCF projects their Inspector product free of charge! Inspector gives full visibility into versions, licenses, and security risks for direct and transitive dependencies.
To sign up for your project, visit https://us.kusari.cloud/signup and go for the free trial. Kusari and CNCF staff will ensure the full product is unlocked for all CNCF GitHub orgs.
Here are docs for any curious: https://docs.kusari.cloud/docs/Inspector/ and if you have any questions, we've been told that y'all can reach out directly by posting to https://github.com/kusaridev/community!
🐳 Docker Hardened Images free for projects
Today, Docker announced that they are making Docker Hardened Images free to all developers.
DHI provides maintainers of CNCF projects with secure, minimal, continuously maintained, base container images that reduce vulnerabilities and attack surfaces while fitting into existing workflows and improving supply-chain security overall.
Many CNCF projects can already be found in the DHI catalog, and giving the broader community access to secure, well-maintained building blocks helps us strengthen the software supply chain together.
Learn how to get started in this announcement from Docker.
📈 Telemetry collection and privacy guidelines
The Linux Foundation maintains telemetry and privacy policies to help protect projects and their users. Projects are expected to follow these guidelines, and for CNCF-provided services staff also reviews third-party tools to ensure alignment before making them available to projects.
We've identified a small number of cases where third-party services may not yet fully align, and we'll be reaching out to work with those project teams to get that sorted. Our goal is to be supportive and collaborative, and to help maintainers ensure transparency, user trust, and alignment with community expectations.
🙏 Please take the Maintainer Survey
Help us help you: maintainers-survey.cncf.io
🎉 Thank you for an amazing year
On behalf of the entire projects team staff, I want to thank you for an amazing year in the CNCF community.
We've seen amazing project growth, accelerated Sandbox project applications reviews and onboarding, and made great strides to improve the velocity at which we evaluate project applications to move to Incubation and Graduation.
As folks will be taking time off through the rest of the year, we remind you that staff GitHub issue, Service Desk ticket, and email responses will likely be slower than normal. Enjoy the holiday season and have a happy new year!
🫶 Daniel, Jeefy, Bob, Nate, Jorge, Riaan, Ihor, Robert and the rest of the CNCF staff