The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept KubeVirt as a CNCF incubating project. KubeVirt enables users to run virtual machine workloads on top of Kubernetes in a Kubernetes-native way. It allows the migration of legacy applications and supports building new applications with virtualization requirements, ultimately strengthening Kubernetes as the tool of choice for running compute workloads.

The KubeVirt project was founded in January 2017 at Red Hat. Since joining CNCF as a Sandbox project in September 2019, the project has added contributors from Amadeus, Apple, CloudFlare, Containership, Giant Swarm, Gitpod, IBM, Kubermatic, Lacoda, NEC, NVIDIA, SAP, Solidfire, SUSE, and independent developers. KubeVirt-based solutions have gone into production at multiple companies, including Arm, CIVO, CoreWeave, H3C, and Kubermatic. The project is now the leading open source tool for running VMs in Kubernetes.

KubeVirt has also maintained a consistent release cadence with over 30 releases since joining Sandbox that continuously improve the project across its components. In just over two years, KubeVirt has increased usability and functionality, performance and runtimes, and migration sources while refining processes, documentation, and security practices.

Kubevirt has also added several projects to the ecosystem like Cluster Network Add-on Operator (CNAO) to manage the lifecycle of the host network and Node Health Check for providing virtual machine high availability.

KubeVirt’s core is well known, but the project has been extended to include smaller projects to address some classical virtualization problems (disk import) and challenges that arise from running on bare metal, which is a requirement for running KubeVirt in production.

As a CNCF-hosted project, KubeVirt is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach.