In GSoC 2026

CNCF

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing open source projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.

Ideas list Website

Contributors in 2026

−6 from 2025

Projects since 2016

118

11.8 a cycle on average

Cycles

10 of 11

10-cycle streak

Rank in 2026

#60

of 183, 0.4% of slots

Mentors

for 11 projects in 2025

Contributors per cycle

Accepted projects each year, against the median organization that year

View as table

CNCF contributors per cycle
	CNCF	Median organization
2016	0	4
2017	6	4
2018	7	3
2019	15	4
2020	17	4
2021	16	4
2022	16	3
2023	14	4
2024	11	4
2025	11	5
2026	5	4

Stack and topics

Each one has its own page of organizations and trends

Quick answers

Is CNCF in GSoC 2026?: Yes, with 5 contributors.
How long has it taken part?: 10 of 11 cycles since 2016, first in 2017, with a 10-cycle streak running.
How many contributors does it usually take?: 11.8 a cycle on average, 118 in total. Its largest cycle was 2020, with 17.
What does it build with?: Prometheus, Go, Kubernetes, Fluentd, Grpc, Go and 6 more.

Accepted projects

5 projects in 2026 · All 118 projects since 2016

Benchmarking and Performance Evaluation of Inference Routing Extensions in kgateway
Abhay1906
kgateway routes AI inference traffic to self-hosted model servers. It picks the best server using EPP scoring — based on KV cache usage, queue depth,...
Project
kpt: Build e-commerce example kpt package
Jaisheesh
Currently, while kpt is a highly capable tool for declarative Kubernetes management, its official examples rely heavily on complex, specialized...
Project
Reactive Agents with Drasi & Dapr
Jeffrey Zhang
Agentic AI is commonly used to predict and resolve problems before they occur, requiring access to data in near real-time. However, traditional...
Project
OSCAL Document Signing and Verification in compliance-trestle
matteofari
This project adds signing and verification for OSCAL JSON artifacts in compliance-trestle so generated documents can be verified in CI/CD and...
Project
Alternative Progressive Delivery for Deployment in OpenKruise Rollout
Yanxi Teng
The current OpenKruise Rollout implementation for Deployment progressive delivery mutates the updateStrategy to Recreate, creating a dangerous risk...
Project

Real-Time Policy Evaluation in Meshery UI using OPA WebAssembly
Aabid AliMentored by Lee Calcote, Mia Grenell, James Horton
Abstract: This proposal outlines a plan to enhance Meshery's relationship evaluation capabilities by implementing client-side policy evaluation using...
Project
Automating Benchmarking of KubeStellar Data-Plane for AI Workloads
Asmit Kumar RaiMentored by Andy Anderson, Braulio, Jim C
Problem: KubeStellar (KS) lacks an automated system to measure and visualize data-plane performance (e.g., sync latencies) under AI workloads, making...
Project
Allow Kubewarden Policies to be Written using JavaScript
Esosa OhangbonMentored by Víctor Cuadrado Juan, José Guilherme Vanz, Flavio Castelli
Kubewarden is a universal policy engine for Kubernetes enabling policy-as-code. It allows users to define and enforce policies for their Kubernetes...
Project
Virtual filesystem security for WasmEdge plug-ins with exporting WASI APIs - Proposal
grorgeMentored by hydai, YiYing He, Shen-Ta Hsieh
This project aims to enhance the security of WasmEdge plug-ins by exporting key WASI APIs, thereby ensuring a robust and secure virtual filesystem...
Project
Knative: Functions AI Agent Callbacks
Kapil SareenMentored by Aleksander Slominski, Luke Kingland
This project aims to integrate AI agents with Knative Functions by developing tools for an MCP server that allows agents to dynamically create and...
Project
Simplified SPM deployment with ElasticSearch/OpenSearch for Jaeger
Minh Nguyen DangMentored by Yuri Shkuro, jkowall
Jaeger’s Service Performance Management (SPM) currently requires a complex setup with a separate processor and Prometheus storage to compute RED...
Project
Generic High-Performance Caching Library for etcd
Peter ChangMentored by Serathius, Madhav Jivrajani
etcd is the “source-of-truth” database behind Kubernetes and many other cloud-native systems, but heavy LIST and WATCH traffic can slow it down....
Project
Privacy-preserving and efficient AI model training across multi-cluster
ShichaoMentored by Qing Hao, Meng Yan
This project aims to enable AI training in a multi-cluster environment while ensuring data privacy through federated learning. In a multi-cluster...
Project

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Enhancements for RAG Chatbot for Vitess
sreehariXMentored by Rohit Nayak, GuptaManan100
The current Vitess RAG chatbot which uses documentation, Slack discussions, and GitHub issues data, has low accuracy. This project aims to improve...
Project
Lima: Support for Virtual Machine Plugin Subsystem
unsuman_Mentored by Akihiro Suda, Anders Björklund
Lima(LInux MAchines) is a tool that helps to run Linux Virtual Machines on macOS and other hosts, with a focus on running containers on them with...
Project
Kubebuilder: Automating Operator Maintenance - Driving Better Results with Less Overhead
Vitor FlorianoMentored by Varsha, Tianyi(Tony), Camila Macedo +1
This project aims to create a GitHub Action similar to Dependabot for Kubebuilder, automating the process of regenerating scaffolds and preserving...
Project

Kubernetes Gateway API: Design and develop notification mechanism for ingress2gateway.
Devaansh KumarMentored by Lior Lieberman, mlavacca
Ingress2gateway is a tool to help users migrate and convert Ingress, and implementation-specific configurations to Gateway API. As we add more...
Project Summary
Move out of gogo/protobuf to protobuf with vtproto implementation
tonyli233Mentored by Max Amin, Callum Styan
We propose transitioning from the deprecated gogo/protobuf to Vitess's vtproto as part of an effort to modernize Prometheus's codebase. The migration...
Project Code
Building a KubeArmor Extension for Rancher Manager
Krish AryanMentored by daemon1024, Rudraksh Pareek
This project aims to create a user-friendly way to manage essential KubeArmor security functions from within the Rancher Manager interface. This will...
Project Code
Improving WASM Support in Knative Functions
Zoey_HongMentored by Matthias Wessendorf, Aleksander Slominski, Luke Kingland
In a single Knative Functions command, we aim to abstract the entire process of building serverless functions using WebAssembly (WASM)—from compiling...
Project Summary
Open Cluster Management: Scheduling AI workload in multi-clusters
Zhe ShenMentored by Qing Hao, Jian Qiu
Enhance Open Cluster Management (OCM) to efficiently schedule AI workloads across multiple Kubernetes clusters by optimizing the use of GPU/TPU...
Project Code
Implementing Coredump for Post-Mortem Debugging in WebAssembly
Siddharth TewariMentored by hydai, Shen-Ta Hsieh
This project aims to implement wasm-coredump, to enhance the debugging capabilities of WebAssembly by implementing a coredump feature for post-mortem...
Project Code
KubeArmor: Automating Benchmarking Workflow
Shubh GaurMentored by daemon1024, Shreyas Mishra, Rudraksh Pareek
The project aims to develop an automated benchmarking system for KubeArmor to enhance the efficiency and repeatability of performance evaluations. By...
Project Summary
Service Mesh Performance
ShlokMishraMentored by Lee Calcote, Mohd Uzair Shaikh
The Objective of this project is to develop IDE plugins that can enhance the developer experience while working with Service Mesh Performance...
Project Code

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CNCF GOSST Collaboration - Enhancing Security Across CNCF Ecosystem
Harshita SaoMentored by Nate W., di, Pedro Nacht
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts a diverse ecosystem of cloud-native projects. Ensuring the security of these projects is paramount...
Project Report
Falco: Upgrading event-generator and automating Falco performance testing
GLVS KiritiMentored by Jason Dellaluce, Aldo Lacuku
This project aims to upgrading the event-generator to improve its testing and bench-marking capabilities, its reliability, and its consistency, and...
Project Code
Prometheus: Continued support for created timestamps
Manik RanaMentored by Bartek Plotka, dhrabovcak
This project aims to advance the support for _created lines, or Created Timestamps, in Prometheus. Building on the groundwork laid during GSoC 2023...
Project Report

Support OpenMetrics _created timestamp in Prometheus
Arthur SensMentored by Max Amin, Bartek Plotka
The proposal consists in treating the time series creation time as another metadata. We propose a few incremental improvements that can be released...
Project Work
Add Support for SQL Database Storage in CurveBS
Bokai JiaMentored by Xiaocui Li
CurveBS currently use etcd as metadata storage but etcd has limited scalability, and the amount of metadata that can be stored is limited.So i plan...
Project Code
Enhancements for Dockerfiles
Darshan KumarMentored by Natalie Arellano
Build out samples and workflows showing how to use Dockerfiles in harmony with a cloud native buildpacks platform. Need to update the pack...
Project Code
Dataplane migration for Apache Kafka communications: Leveraging Java19’s Project Loom.
Debasish BiswasMentored by Ali Ok ., Christoph Stäbler, Pierangelo Di Pilato +1
Overview: In the current scenario, the Knative Eventing Kafka Broker's data-plane communication with Apache Kafka for consuming and producing records...
Project Summary
Kubebuilder phase 2 plugin
Eileen YuMentored by Rashmi Gottipati, Camila Macedo, Bryce Palmer
The introduction of external plugin extends the functionality of the Kubebuilder CLI tool by allowing users to create and use custom plugins. These...
Project Code
Jaeger: Make ClickHouse a core storage backend
Ha Anh VuMentored by Yuri Shkuro
This project aims at leveraging the current community jaeger-clickhouse storage plugin and making ClickHouse one of the core storage backend for...
Project Report
GitHub Actions for KubeArmor
Haiyu ZuoMentored by daemon1024, Ankur Kothiwal, Anurag
Our goal is to create a Github Action from KubeArmor, which will be used by other Github projects. This Github Action, using KubeArmor, will be used...
Project Code
Conmon-rs support for podman
mgjmMentored by Peter Hunt, mheon
Running containers with podman using conmon-rs as the container monitor. This requires additional features to be implemented in conmon-rs and an...
Project Work

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Streamlined OpenFeature Enhancement Proposal Process
none_24Mentored by Michael Beemer, David Hirsch
Streamlining the OFEP process for enhancing community engagement through automation scripts by doing almost everything they can, from creating...
Project Report
Timeframe for Metrics
Rakshit GondwalMentored by Thomas Schuetz, Florian Bacher
Currently, the Metrics Controller in the Keptn Lifecycle Toolkit only allows querying a single value per metric. This project will enable users to...
Project Code
Falco: Web IDE for Security Rules with WebAssembly
Rohith RajuMentored by Jason Dellaluce
This project aims to improve Falco's capabilities by adding WebAssembly as a new officially-supported compilation target. The objective is to create...
Project Code
Kubectl plugin for Armada
Shivang ShandilyaMentored by Kevin Hannon, Geoff Wilson
The proposal deals with the problem of the creation of a kubectl plugin for Armada, the creation of the desired plugin will allow users to...
Project Code
Prototyping Support for Content Addressable Systems like IPFS in TUF
Shubham NazareMentored by Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli, Ericson2314
The TUF specification provides explicit guidelines for how artifacts should be hashed and later verified to guarantee their integrity. However,...
Project Summary
IDE Plugins for editing vela applications
Swastik GourMentored by Somefive
One possible way to use the Kubernetes API to connect to the KubeVela Control Plane in the background and fetch the required information like...
Project Summary

in-toto: DSSE Implementation
Pradyumna KrishnaMentored by Lukas Pühringer, Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli
in-toto framework generates metadata files that are represented as signature wrapper or envelope. in-toto current signature wrapper requires...
Project Work
Normalize TiKV Java client for TiSpark
ZiJian RenMentored by zhangyangyu, Yuhang Shi
TiSpark maintains a com.pingcap.tikv/tikv-client module. It is a fork of the current official tikv-client legacy version. The difference from the...
Project Code
Implement WASI and wasmedge_process host functions on Windows
Abhinandan UdupaMentored by hydai
WebAssembly has become extremely popular among the developer community lately. It offers near native performance in a browser and is meant to not be...
Project Code
RPC cross different namespaces through unix socket
shouxunsunMentored by Yang Keao, Li Chenxi
The chaos-daemon component of Chaos Mesh manages many subprocesses to inject faults into other containers(Linux namespaces), and we need to...
Project Code
Standardize Cache Flag options for pack CLI
Nitish GuptaMentored by Javier Romero
Introduce a new variadic flag to the Pack CLI that enables configuring different cache types geared towards app developers or operators that are...
Project Report
A Grafana Dashboard Plugin to Observe Controller Metrics
Tianyi(Tony)Mentored by Varsha, Camila Macedo, Rashmi Gottipati
This project aims to provide unified Grafana dashboards to visualize K8s controller/operator status based on Kubebuilder. In general, users have to...
Project Report
Add SLSA provenance support to in-toto-rs and rebuilderd
Lenery ChenMentored by Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli
Rebuilderd is a verification system for binary packages. It repeates the build process of a package in an identical environment and verifies that the...
Project Code
New Golang plugin to help Operator authors skill up
Nikhil SharmaMentored by Varsha, Camila Macedo, Rashmi Gottipati
This proposal defines a new plugin that allows users to get the scaffold with the required code to have a project that will deploy and manage an...
Project Report

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Single binary deployment outside kubernetes environment.
Basit HasanMentored by Yang Keao
Chaos Mesh supports injecting errors into the physical machine through PhysicalMachineChaos. However, deploying it outside the Kubernetes cluster is...
Project Code
Tooling to deploy and cross-configure cert-manager with external dependencies by Terraform
Zhe ChengMentored by Irbe Krumina
Design and create Terraform modules framework that is benefit to extension and reusability to easily install and configure cert-manager, associated...
Project Summary
KubeArmor Observability and Policy Discovery Helper Tool
Nathaniel JasonMentored by daemon1024
Running Kubernetes should be done with the utmost security in mind. KubeArmor provides a policy based system to increase the quality of security in a...
Project Report
CNCF Cluster: Performance Benchmarking
Aaditya Narayan SubedyMentored by Lee Calcote
The Service Mesh Performance standard captures and characterizes infrastructure capacity, service mesh configuration, and workload metadata. When we...
Project Code
CoreDNS: Add ACME protocol support for certificate management into TLS plugin
Marius KimminaMentored by Yong Tang
When using CoreDNS to serve DNS traffic over TLS/HTTPS certificates have to be managed (created and renewed) manually. The goal of my project is to...
Project Code
Implementing TAP(TUF Augmentation Proposal) 14 for python’s reference implementation
Abhisman SarkarMentored by Marina Moore
Implementing version management for TUF’s python reference implementation. The implementation does not currently have a way to migrate TUF...
Project Code
in-toto: Add provenance extension to Jenkins plugin
Lakshya GuptaMentored by Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli
In-toto is a framework designed to protect software supply chain integrity. It provides security against attackers who can get control of a step in...
Project Code
Expand Service Mesh Patterns catalog
Yash KambojMentored by Lee Calcote
Create a centralized catalog of Patterns, WebAssembly filters and eBPF programs which let's the user import, edit and deploy patterns.The Service...
Project Code

Cloud Storage
Furqan MunirMentored by Ratna Kiran Mova
A cloud computing is a set of huge networks and computing nodes, where enormous amount of data flow takes place. An efficient performance is needed...
Project Report
Versioned rawKV
Hyungsuk KangMentored by Yi Wu
Versioned key-value data management interface for TiKV
Project Report
Anomaly Detection of the CoreDNS Server through Machine Learning
Chanakya EkboteMentored by Yong Tang
This project aims to try and detect anomalies that occur in a CoreDNS server using a machine learning model developed in Keras. This project would...
Project Report
Cloud Native KV-service
Devdutt ShenoiMentored by Yi Wu
To create a Cloud Native TiKV implementation which utilises a Cloud Platform's remote provisions to augment the current local only storage back-end...
Project Report
Develop local cluster provider for test-infa/prombench and extending test-infra
Raj Babu DasMentored by Hrishikesh Barman
This project aims is to work on the following issues: Develop local cluster provider (KIND) Deployment of Prombench on EKS and local cluster Resolve...
Project Code
Selectively disable Indexing of labels
JayBatraMentored by Bryan Boreham, Ryan Zhang
Prometheus is one of the standard-bearing open-source solutions for monitoring and observability. As a Prometheus-as-a-Service platform, Cortex fills...
Project Code
Port runlib into in-toto golang
Christian RebischkeMentored by Santiago Torres-Arias, Justin Cappos, Lukas Pühringer
in-toto is a project for protecting supply chain integrity. The project is a sister project of the TUF project and both are there for tightening the...
Project Work
Rewrite NFS Operator to use controller-runtime
Ahmad Nurus ShobahMentored by Ashish Ranjan, jbw976, Rohan
This project aims to implement controller-runtime for Rook nfs-operator and addresses several issues along with it. Currently, Rook nfs-operator only...
Project Code

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Per Series Metric Retention - Thanos
Harshitha Chowdary ThotaMentored by Matthias Loibl, Bartek Plotka
Thanos is allowing storing metrics for long, if not unlimited time. Currently however there is no fine-granular process of retaining only some...
Project Report
Kubernetes Multitenancy Working Group: Benchmarks
Anuj SharmaMentored by tashimi, Ryan Bezdicek, JimBugwadia
The Kubernetes Multi-Tenancy Working Group is chartered with exploring and defining multi-tenancy models for Kubernetes. The Multi Tenancy Benchmarks...
Project Code
Cluster Addons: Package all things!
Somtochi OnyekwereMentored by Justin Santa Barbara
Cluster Addons are resources that are considered inherently part of the Kubernetes cluster as they help extend the functionality of the cluster. Over...
Project Code
Prometheus - Running prombench on EKS and update dashboards
Drumil PatelMentored by Hrishikesh Barman
Prombench is the automated E2E testing and benchmarking for Prometheus. Prombench uses Kubernetes to benchmark Prometheus using various scalable...
Project Report
Distributed Load Testing of Envoy Data Planes
Kush TrivediMentored by Lee Calcote-1, Ryan Zhang, Shivay Lamba
Many performance benchmarks are limited to single instance load generation (single pod load generator). This limits the amount of traffic that can be...
Project Summary
SMI Conformance Tool
Naveen JainMentored by Lee Calcote-1
Currently, there exists no software solution for checking whether a service mesh implements Service Mesh Interface or not. This causes the following...
Project Work
Prometheus: Extending promtool for formatting PromQL expressions and YAML structure in rules files
Harkishen SinghMentored by Ganesh Vernekar, Tobias Guggenmos
Prometheus is a monitoring tool that monitors the specified targets, scrapes the system and application metrics at regular intervals, evaluates rules...
Project Code
Enriching and Extending Thanos UIs with React for Awesome User Experience
Prem SaraswatMentored by squat, Bartek Plotka, Giedrius Statkevičius
So far Thanos has successfully used pieces of old Prometheus UI with some improvements. However, since Prometheus now moved all UI pages to React, it...
Project Summary
Do resource delivery around Kubernetes
Wangqian QianMentored by Jianbo Sun
Resource Provision: Use CRD Operator to invoke the cloud resource and create the resource object. Resource Binding: Use Service binding to do the...
Project Report

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Data: Google Summer of Code public archive. Contributor counts are accepted projects.

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