Kubeflow Has Graduated from CNCF

Kubeflow just reached one of the biggest milestones a cloud native project can hit! Graduation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

What This Means

CNCF graduation is not just a badge, it is confirmation that a project is mature, widely adopted, and production-ready. For Kubeflow, it recognizes the project’s role as the Kubernetes-native backbone for running AI and ML workloads at scale: from data processing and interactive development to distributed training, fine-tuning, inference, and model serving.

By the Numbers

Since joining CNCF as an incubating project in 2023, Kubeflow has grown into a genuinely massive community effort:

  • 6,600+ contributors across 1,000+ organizations
  • 33,000+ GitHub stars across its repositories
  • Nearly 260 million PyPI downloads of its Python packages
  • Adopted by major enterprises from different industries, including Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Red Hat, LinkedIn, and Spotify, which use Kubeflow to standardize their AI workloads

To get here, the project also completed a third-party security audit, formalized its steering committee, and adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct. The kind of unglamorous work that makes “production-ready” more than a marketing line.

Why It Matters

As more enterprises move AI workloads from experimentation into production, they need infrastructure that’s scalable, portable, and vendor-neutral, not locked into a single cloud or platform. Kubeflow gives teams that foundation on Kubernetes, letting data scientists, ML engineers, and platform teams work from the same standardized base instead of stitching together one-off tooling.

A Community Effort

What stands out most in CNCF’s announcement isn’t the metrics, it’s how many people, across multiple different companies and industries describe Kubeflow as something they genuinely built together over years, often outside their day jobs. Voices from NVIDIA, Red Hat, Capital One, AWS, Canonical and others all shared what this milestone means to them.

That’s really what graduation reflects: a community that committed to an open, Kubernetes-native vision for AI infrastructure long enough to make it the standard.

You can find more details about Kubeflow Graduation here.

Catch Up on Past Kubeflow Events

Graduation is a great excuse to look back at some of the talks and sessions the community has put together. Check out the playlists from past Kubeflow events:

Want more? Subscribe to the Kubeflow YouTube channel to catch new talks, demos, and community meeting recordings as soon as they’re posted.

Want to help?

The Kubeflow community Working Groups hold open meetings and are always looking for more volunteers and users to unlock the potential of machine learning. If you’re interested in becoming a Kubeflow contributor, please feel free to check out the resources below. We look forward to working with you!