Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Karmada Graduation

Multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes orchestration project reaches production maturity as global enterprises scale AI training and inference across hybrid infrastructure

Key Highlights

• Karmada has graduated from the CNCF, recognizing the project's maturity as an open source engine for orchestrating applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters, clouds, and regions without modifying the applications themselves.
• Karmada v1.19 release advances multi-component scheduling for distributed AI training jobs.
• Global enterprises and leading cloud, telecom, and AI platforms, including Bloomberg, Wellhub, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, and Trip.com, rely on Karmada for hybrid cloud capacity, multi-region resilience, and multi-cluster AI infrastructure.

SHANGHAI, Sept. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026 — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announces the graduation of Karmada, an open source project that lets organizations run applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters, clouds, and regions without changing the applications themselves.

This milestone comes as Karmada advances multi-cluster AI infrastructure through its v1.19 release, which advances multi-component scheduling for distributed AI training jobs and promotes priority-based scheduling to Beta, enabled by default, to ensure critical workloads are scheduled first. The project's production footprint now powers mission-critical infrastructure for a diverse global adopter base, ranging from global enterprises like Bloomberg and Wellhub to major cloud, telecom, and AI platforms across Asia.

"As organizations scale Kubernetes across clusters and GPU constrained AI environments, having a production ready way to coordinate that fleet becomes critical to operational success," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. "Reaching CNCF graduation demonstrates that Karmada has achieved the technical maturity, governance, and security work required for the enterprise; we look forward to seeing the project continue to grow within the ecosystem."

Short for Kubernetes Armada, Karmada extends the standard Kubernetes API with centralized placement, propagation, failover, and multi-cluster autoscaling. Karmada's CNCF history dates back to its first commit in November 2020. The project then officially joined in September 2021 as a Sandbox project before advancing to Incubating status in December 2023.

Since joining CNCF, Karmada has grown to more than 1,214 contributors across 292 contributing organizations and more than 5,600 GitHub stars. Its production adopter base includes a significant portion of Chinese cloud, internet, telecom, AI, travel, logistics, device, and enterprise organizations, including Alibaba Cloud, Bilibili, Huawei, iFLYTEK, JDCloud, Kuaishou, RedNote, SenseTime, Trip.com, Vivo, WPS, and ZTO, alongside global adopters like Bloomberg and Wellhub. These companies use Karmada to support hybrid cloud capacity, multi-region resilience, intelligent traffic distribution, AI training, GPU/CPU scheduling, multi-cluster application delivery, and fleet-wide service-configuration distribution.

Karmada also integrates directly with existing CNCF observability and deployment projects: it exports Prometheus metrics across its control-plane components, packages an etcd instance for control-plane state, and ships Helm charts for installation.

"I am proud that Karmada has grown into critical infrastructure that large enterprises count on — powering everything from microservices to big data and AI," said Hongcai Ren, Karmada maintainer. "None of this would have happened without the open, neutral platform CNCF built, where adopters and developers explore this space side by side. Graduation is a new starting point: we look forward to partnering with more adopters, learning from richer real-world scenarios, and working with the broader ecosystem to tackle the challenges of AI and agent infrastructure together."

Karmada's broader 2026 roadmap builds on that foundation, moving multi-cluster Kubernetes from basic workload propagation toward a more resource-aware control plane. It also includes priority-based preemption, multi-cluster queuing for AI training and batch jobs, and multi-cluster support for Kubernetes Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) across GPUs and other accelerators.

To reach graduation status, Karmada completed a third-party security audit, established a formal steering committee to ensure transparent governance, and adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct. The project also maintains a Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Best Practices Badge, demonstrating a commitment to secure software development.

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.

The announcement was made during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026, where these three Foundations convened together in China for the first time on a single stage, underscoring the growing need for multi-cluster orchestration that spans private data centers, public clouds, and specialized AI hardware.

Supporting Quotes

"As organizations scale beyond a single Kubernetes cluster, they need consistent management without added complexity. Karmada solves this by extending familiar Kubernetes APIs to work across clusters and clouds. With maintainers across six organizations and adopters running it at significant scale, we congratulate Karmada on its successful graduation as a CNCF project," – Chad Beaudin, TOC Sponsor.

"Karmada has become foundational to how Bloomberg operates resilient cloud native infrastructure. By automating disaster recovery, improving resource utilization, and simplifying the management of individual Kubernetes clusters, it has enabled our platform engineering teams to operate more efficiently, while also giving internal application teams a simpler, more consistent experience deploying jobs. As close collaborators with the Karmada community over the past few years, we have seen this open source project continue to evolve, and its graduation reflects its growing importance to enterprise organizations that are managing complex Kubernetes environments." – Michas Szacillo, Engineering Team Lead of Bloomberg's Streaming Platform and Karmada maintainer

"At Trip.com, Karmada has become a critical part of our multi-cluster infrastructure and has delivered significant value in production. Without changing existing Kubernetes resource definitions, it has enabled us to operate multiple clusters as a unified resource pool, support cross-cluster elasticity and failover, bring new clusters into production more efficiently, and perform large-scale workload migration with minimal disruption to applications. This has greatly reduced the complexity of operating infrastructure at scale. As computing increasingly spans regions, clouds, and heterogeneous resources, we believe Karmada will become an essential foundation for reliable and scalable cloud-native and AI infrastructure." – Honghui Yue, Senior Development Expert, Trip.com

"Karmada powers multi-cluster orchestration in DaoCloud's enterprise platform, helping customers implement multi-cloud strategies through a consistent, Kubernetes-native experience across clusters and environments. Compatibility with Kubernetes APIs and existing toolchains makes it practical for production, while our community participation turns customer feedback into upstream improvements. We are extending this foundation to our AI Token Factory architecture as multi-cluster inference across data centers becomes increasingly important. Graduation gives us greater confidence in Karmada as a long-term foundation, and we look forward to contributing more capabilities for production AI inference," – Kay Yan, Chief Architect, DaoCloud.

For more information about Karmada, visit https://karmada.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