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Help Kairos Move to CNCF Incubation: Become an Adopter

· 4 min read
Mauro Morales
Mauro Morales

Kairos community,

We are preparing the next major step in our CNCF journey: applying to move from Sandbox to Incubation.

To do that, we need to demonstrate healthy and diverse real-world adoption. As part of the official CNCF TOC project lifecycle and process, projects are expected to provide 5-7 adopters willing to be interviewed during due diligence.

Today, we are inviting organizations using Kairos to participate as adopters and help us through this milestone.

We also understand adoption takes time. If you are currently in a proof-of-concept stage, that is absolutely okay. We would still love to talk, learn from your experience, and help you move toward pre-production and production in any way we can.

Why Incubation?​

Incubation is where CNCF projects start demonstrating stronger maturity signals: more stability, broader production usage, and clearer evidence that the project is useful in real environments.

For Kairos, this helps us:

  • Strengthen long-term credibility in the cloud-native ecosystem
  • Validate production readiness through independent adopter feedback
  • Accelerate project growth while keeping development open and vendor-neutral

A signal that Kairos is growing in the open​

This effort is part of a broader direction for Kairos.

We recently welcomed our first maintainer from a different company than the original Kairos creators, a concrete sign of growing shared ownership and open governance:

What it means to be a Kairos adopter​

Being an adopter means your organization uses Kairos in a meaningful way (proof of concept, pilot, pre-production, or production) and can share practical feedback, including:

  • Why you chose Kairos
  • Which use cases you support with it
  • What value it brings in operations, reliability, security, or scale
  • What challenges you faced and how we can improve

You do not need to be a large enterprise, and you do not need to be a direct code contributor.

What CNCF may ask from your organization​

If selected as one of the adopter references, your organization may be contacted by CNCF TOC sponsors for an adopter interview as part of the incubation due diligence process.

These interviews typically cover:

  • Adoption context and timeline
  • Current usage stage and scale
  • Perception of project maturity and governance
  • Strengths, gaps, and future needs

Confidentiality and publication boundaries​

We understand many teams have legal or commercial constraints.

The CNCF process can accommodate adopter anonymity and publication boundaries when needed, and adopter interview summaries are reviewed with adopters before publication.

What your organization gets​

We see this as a practical collaboration where both sides benefit.

By participating, your organization can:

  • Support a CNCF Sandbox project advancing toward Incubation
  • Be recognized in CNCF-related due diligence materials when disclosure is allowed
  • Stay close to the Kairos roadmap and maintainer discussions
  • Share engineering feedback that directly influences project priorities

And if your organization wants public recognition, we can also:

  • Feature your organization as a Kairos adopter on the Kairos website
  • Include your logo on our adopters page (fully opt-in, based on your approval and brand guidelines)
  • Collaborate on public technical stories, including potential CNCF blog posts

Interested in joining as an adopter?​

If your organization is using Kairos and is open to this conversation, you can:

When you contact us, it helps if you include:

  • Organization name
  • Main use case
  • Current stage (pilot, pre-production, or production)
  • Preferred visibility level (public, limited public, or private first)

Thanks for helping us take Kairos to the next level.

This milestone is about more than project status. It is about proving, together, that Kairos is delivering real value in real systems.