CNCF Graduates KubeVirt as Project Marks 10 Years of Running VMs on Kubernetes
SALT LAKE CITY -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 that KubeVirt, the open source project that extends Kubernetes to run and manage virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers, has reached graduated status. The milestone coincides with the project’s 10th anniversary.
Red Hat created KubeVirt in 2016. The project adds VM management to an existing cluster through custom resources and controllers, so teams can create, schedule and manage VMs with the same declarative APIs they use for containers. KubeVirt entered the CNCF Sandbox in September 2019 and moved to Incubating in April 2022. To graduate, the project completed a third-party security audit, established a formal steering committee and adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct.
Contributors and Production Adopters
KubeVirt has grown to 2,088 contributors across 520 organizations, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, SUSE and Red Hat. Production users include ByteDance, Cloudflare, CoreWeave and NVIDIA, with uses ranging from cloud gaming and CI runners to GPU-backed VMs for AI cloud infrastructure. Swisscom runs a sovereign managed Kubernetes service built on KubeVirt and Kube-OVN that spans 390 clusters and 2,100 worker nodes.
“As organizations scale AI and cloud native infrastructure, running VMs and containers under one platform is critical to efficiency and operational success,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “KubeVirt’s graduation solidifies it as a Kubernetes-native way to bring VMs into the platform, giving teams the consistency they need to modernize on their own schedule.”
Roadmap Focuses on AI Hardware and Confidential VMs
GPU claims through Kubernetes Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) reached beta in KubeVirt v1.9, and the same model is being extended to SR-IOV network devices, generic host devices and CPUs. Confidential VM support spans AMD SEV and SEV-SNP, IBM Secure Execution and Intel TDX, with Arm CCA in development. The community is also working toward a pluggable framework, building on the Hypervisor Abstraction Layer introduced in v1.8, so alternatives to KVM such as Cloud Hypervisor, OpenVMM and Firecracker can live outside the core project.
