CNCF Announces Kyverno Graduation as Policy-as-Code Adoption Grows

AMSTERDAM — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced the graduation of Kyverno, a Kubernetes-native policy engine, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026. The project has reached the highest maturity level in the CNCF after demonstrating widespread production adoption and significant community growth.

Originally created by Nirmata and contributed to the CNCF in 2020, Kyverno enables organizations to define, manage and enforce policy-as-code across cloud native environments. The project has grown from 574 GitHub stars at contribution to more than 9,000 and is used by organizations including Bloomberg, Coinbase, Deutsche Telekom, Groww, LinkedIn, Spotify, Vodafone and Wayfair.

“Kyverno’s graduation highlights how important policy-as-code has become for organizations running cloud native in production at scale,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “The project makes it easier for platform teams to enforce governance and security practices using familiar Kubernetes constructs, and the strong community behind Kyverno shows how critical this capability is across the ecosystem.”

The foundation said Kyverno has fully adopted Common Expression Language in its latest release, aligning with the future direction of Kubernetes admission controls. Upcoming releases will focus on extending policy enforcement to additional control points across the cloud native stack, including support for artificial intelligence and Model Context Protocol gateways. The project completed a third-party security audit and passed a formal governance review as part of the graduation process.