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

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has graduated Kyverno, a Kubernetes-native policy engine, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026. Originally created by Nirmata and donated to CNCF in 2020, Kyverno has grown from 574 to over 9,000 GitHub stars and is used in production by major organizations including Bloomberg, Coinbase, LinkedIn, and Spotify. The project has adopted Common Expression Language in its latest release, aligning with Kubernetes admission control direction. Future work will extend policy enforcement across the cloud native stack, including AI and Model Context Protocol gateways. Graduation followed a third-party security audit and formal governance review.