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Welcome to the October 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter.
We look forward to seeing many of you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in less than two short weeks!
CNCF staff will be at the various maintainer-focused activities all week.
Originally published on the CNCF blog on October 1, 2026.
You do not need “maintainer” in your job title to start following the maintainer journey at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026.
You might be an SRE who has spent years operating a CNCF project in production. An application developer who found and fixed a bug. An infrastructure engineer who has opened issues, improved documentation, or built something your upstream community could use.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gives attendees several ways to move closer to the open source communities behind the technology, whether you are already a maintainer or are making your first contribution. Register Today!
For existing maintainers, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon creates rare face-to-face time with contributors, users, and neighboring project communities. Those conversations can surface real-world feedback, new contributors, shared technical challenges, and opportunities to collaborate across the ecosystem.
For attendees who are not maintainers yet, the event provides multiple low-barrier ways to get closer to a project. Maintainer Track sessions, ContribFests, Project Lightning Talks, and the Project Pavilion can help turn “I use this project” into “I know how to contribute to it.”
If you already maintain a project, think about the challenge that is hardest to solve asynchronously: contributor onboarding, release processes, project governance, documentation, adoption feedback, or collaboration across projects. Face-to-face time can make those conversations much easier.
If you are newer to contribution, your questions may be simpler:
For eligible CNCF project maintainers, the CNCF Maintainer Summit takes place on Sunday, November 8 before the main conference.
The Summit provides a dedicated space for the people behind CNCF projects to meet face-to-face, share best practices, discuss contribution processes, and work through common challenges across project communities.
Separate registration and eligibility requirements apply, so attendees should review those requirements ahead of time.
On Monday, Project Lightning Talks give CNCF projects five minutes each to share recent updates, new features, and other highlights.
Unlike the CNCF-hosted co-located events, Project Lightning Talks are available with any in-person KubeCon + CloudNativeCon pass.
For someone exploring the ecosystem, this is a fast way to discover projects you may not already know. For existing contributors and maintainers, it is a chance to see what neighboring communities are working on.
The Maintainer Track is where attendees can hear directly from CNCF project maintainers about new developments, technical challenges, implementation considerations, community priorities, and project roadmaps. Sessions to consider include:
If there is a project your organization depends on, this is an opportunity to hear from and talk with the people building it.
ContribFests turn that conversation into hands-on participation.
Attendees can work alongside project maintainers and contributors to tackle real issues, learn contribution workflows, understand project architecture, and begin participating in a community.
This year's program includes opportunities with communities including:
Some sessions explicitly welcome first-time contributors.
You do not have to arrive knowing exactly how you want to contribute. Showing up curious is enough to start.
The Project Pavilion is open during the main conference in the Solutions Showcase and provides another easy way to connect directly with project communities.
Stop by a project kiosk. Ask maintainers what they are working on. Find out where they need help. Discover a project you did not know existed.
Sometimes the path into open source starts with a pull request. Sometimes it starts with a hallway conversation.
For maintainers and future contributors, some of the most valuable parts of the week may never appear on the formal schedule. A conversation at a project kiosk can turn into end-user feedback. A ContribFest introduction can become a first pull request. A hallway discussion can connect two projects working through the same problem.
Use the scheduled programming as a starting point, but leave room for the community around it. Those relationships are often what continue long after the conference ends.
For maintainers, the value can be practical: new contributor relationships, direct end-user feedback, ideas borrowed from other project communities, and time to solve problems that are difficult to work through in issues and chat.
For future contributors, you may leave with:
That is why the Maintainer Journey overlaps every other journey in this series.
SREs bring production experience. Application developers understand how projects feel to the people building with them. Infrastructure engineers understand what happens when those projects have to operate at scale.
Open source communities need all of those perspectives.
Whether you already maintain a CNCF project, have made a few contributions, or are simply wondering how to get involved, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gives you a place to take the next step.
Join us in Salt Lake City and find your place in the cloud native community.
Don't forget to register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026.
Welcome to the September 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter.
We hope you enjoyed KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China this month and we look forward to seeing many of you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in a few short weeks!
Please take a moment to complete the 2H 2026 Maintainer Survey. Your feedback helps us improve the tools, workflows, and support programs that directly affect how CNCF projects operate, scale, and onboard maintainers.
.project UpdatesDeadlines, project benefits, and communications for maintainers.
The TOC has updated the Due Diligence Guide to clarify expectations for adopter interviews during the moving levels process. These changes aim to reduce delays, improve the quality of adoption signal, and give projects a clearer picture of what to prepare before applying.
Here is a summary of what changed and what it means for projects and TOC members.
Welcome to the July 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter.
We hope you enjoyed KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan this week and we look forward to seeing many of you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China soon!
CNCF staff will be at the various maintainer-focused activities in Shanghai on September 8-9.
Please take a moment to complete the 2H 2026 Maintainer Survey. Your feedback is essential for us to serve you better in the second half of the year.
Welcome to the June 2026 edition of the Cloud Native Project Monthly (CNPM) Newsletter.
We look forward to seeing many of you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan next month!
CNCF staff will be at the various maintainer-focused activities on July 29-30.
Please take a moment to complete the 2H 2026 Maintainer Survey. Your feedback is essential for us to serve you better in the second half of the year.
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.