Ten years after bringing VMs into Kubernetes, the project reaches production maturity as organizations run VMs, containers, and AI workloads on a single platform

Key Highlights

• KubeVirt has graduated from CNCF while celebrating 10 years of development, recognizing its maturity as a Kubernetes-native solution for running and managing virtual machines alongside containers.
• KubeVirt enables organizations to unify VM, container and AI workloads under a single Kubernetes control plane, simplifying infrastructure management and supporting modernization without requiring application rewrites.
• KubeVirt has grown to more than 2,000 contributors across 520 organizations, with production adopters including ByteDance, Cloudflare, CoreWeave and NVIDIA.

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — KUBECON + CLOUDNATIVECON NORTH AMERICA — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the graduation of KubeVirt, an open source project that extends Kubernetes to run and manage virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers.

“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, 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. We’re thrilled to celebrate a decade of work with the maintainers and contributors who made this happen.”

When Red Hat created KubeVirt in 2016, VMs and containers were treated as two different worlds, with separate tools, workflows, and expertise. KubeVirt filled that gap without replacing Kubernetes or requiring a separate control plane. It 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. Organizations can keep applications in VMs while modernizing incrementally, rather than rewriting everything as containers first.

KubeVirt was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in September 2019 and moved to Incubating in April 2022. 2026 marks KubeVirt’s tenth anniversary and has been a year of significant milestones. In March, the project held its first-ever in-person KubeVirt Summit at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe that coincided with the release of KubeVirt v1.8. The update added a Hypervisor Abstraction Layer, Intel TDX attestation for confidential VMs, storage-agnostic incremental backup, and performance improvements that let AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in VMs run at near-native speed. KubeVirt works with other CNCF projects as well, including Prometheus for monitoring, Argo for GitOps-style management, Istio for service mesh integration, and Velero for VM backup workflows.

“When Red Hat helped establish KubeVirt, the goal was to converge on one operational model for legacy infrastructure and the cloud native ecosystem,” said Fabian Deutsch, founder and maintainer, KubeVirt. “What makes me proudest today is seeing KubeVirt evolve from that early vision into an enterprise-grade engine trusted by global organizations to run thousands of critical VMs in production. Together with a diverse, vendor-neutral community, we proved that you don’t have to choose between keeping legacy workloads alive and modernizing your operations—you can do both seamlessly on one platform with Kubernetes.”

Since launch, KubeVirt has grown to 2,088 contributors across 520 contributing organizations, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, SUSE, and Red Hat, and 7,100 GitHub stars. Awareness and adoption are also growing. In a 2025 industry survey, 86% of Kubernetes adopters were aware of KubeVirt, with 26% already using it in production. Organizations running KubeVirt in production include ByteDance, Cloudflare, CoreWeave, and NVIDIA for uses ranging from cloud gaming and CI runners to GPU-backed VMs for AI cloud infrastructure. In August 2025, Swisscom launched a sovereign managed Kubernetes service built on KubeVirt and Kube-OVN that now runs 390 clusters, 2,100 worker nodes, and 160 TB of persistent storage in production.

“KubeVirt’s graduation marks a major milestone for open source AI. Standardizing end-to-end machine learning workflows on cloud-native infrastructure is essential for enterprise adoption,” Ryan Hallisey, Principal Software Engineer, NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is proud to contribute and help developers more easily leverage accelerated computing and GPUs to build, train, and deploy next-generation AI models efficiently at scale.” 

KubeVirt’s roadmap builds on its Kubernetes-native design principle: use what the cluster already provides rather than building virtualization-specific workarounds. Planned and in-progress work includes:

• Devices and AI hardware: GPU claims through Kubernetes Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) reached beta in v1.9. The same model is being extended to SR-IOV network devices, generic host devices, and CPUs, so a VM can request a GPU, NIC, and CPUs allocated together. Work is also underway to run on the newest NVIDIA systems.
• Confidential VMs: Support spans AMD SEV and SEV-SNP (beta), IBM Secure Execution (generally available), and Intel TDX (alpha), with Arm CCA in development. Contributors are also exploring integration with attestation and secret-release services such as Trustee from the CNCF Incubating project Confidential Containers.
• Extensibility: Structured plugins, available as alpha in v1.9, let users build features outside the core while keeping KubeVirt API guarantees.
• Pluggable virtualization stacks: Building on the Hypervisor Abstraction Layer introduced in v1.8, the community is working toward a pluggable framework so alternatives to KVM, such as Cloud Hypervisor, OpenVMM, and Firecracker, can live out of tree.

To reach graduation status, KubeVirt completed a third-party security audit, established a formal steering committee to ensure transparent governance, and adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community, defining its vision and stewarding projects through maturity levels up to graduation.

For more information about KubeVirt, visit https://kubevirt.io/.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation