Akamai, a CNCF Gold member since 2023 and a committed supporter of open source infrastructure, is generously donating $1,000,000 in annual cloud credits. The donation will support both the Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Framing the Challenge
As cloud native technologies evolve to address AI, edge, and platform engineering demands, the infrastructure required to build, test, and scale these projects grows more complex. CI/CD pipelines, release testing, and performance benchmarking often require significant compute power. Community-led projects can struggle to access the necessary infrastructure without dependable support.
Why This Matters
Cloud credit donations are critical for enabling sustainable project operations without shifting costs to maintainers. Akamai’s credit contribution will allow CNCF to better support scalable, resilient infrastructure that benefits a range of technical initiatives.
“We’re incredibly grateful for Akamai’s infrastructure contribution—it’s the kind of support that helps our community scale—experiment—and push cloud native innovation forward,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “When our members invest like this, it strengthens the resilience and long-term impact of the entire ecosystem.”
Supporting Innovation Through Infrastructure
As a Gold member, Akamai has deepened its collaboration with CNCF to ensure that projects can access the cloud infrastructure they need to thrive. We will direct the credits toward supporting project infrastructure needs.
The credits will be allocated through the CNCF to support projects at all maturity levels, from Sandbox to Graduated. Project maintainers will be able to request resources to be provisioned on Akamai’s cloud platform via the CNCF ServiceDesk.
The primary goal of this support is to bolster the core infrastructure that projects rely on for development, testing, and community operations. This includes scaling CI/CD pipelines, running extensive performance and conformance tests, and providing reliable infrastructure for artifact storage and other shared services. This ensures that projects can remain secure, resilient, and focused on innovation.
“Supporting the CNCF community is part of our mission to ensure the internet and the software that powers it remain open, secure, and resilient,” said Ari Weil, vice president of cloud marketing at Akamai. “These credits reflect our belief that sustainable innovation starts with dependable infrastructure.”
Real-World Impact
Akamai’s broader engagement with open source infrastructure reflects its commitment to supporting foundational technologies.
This donation builds on Akamai’s deep, practical support for the open source community. Akamai already provides the essential infrastructure for both kernel.org, the home of the Linux kernel, and Alpine Linux. Their engineering teams also actively contribute to CNCF projects and provide leadership across the ecosystem—from the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) to foundational work as former co-chairs of TAG Storage and TAG Runtime.
This significant contribution is earmarked for direct infrastructure support to enhance CI/CD pipelines, expand performance testing capacity, and directly offset operational costs for maintainers. This allows project teams to focus on innovation and resilience, knowing their core infrastructure is supported.
Conclusion & Next Steps
This credit contribution is a clear investment in the sustainability of open source infrastructure. Akamai’s support helps CNCF projects continue building, testing, and delivering resilient software at scale.
What’s Next?
- CNCF will collaborate with project maintainers to allocate and report on credit usage
- Success stories will be documented and shared with the community
- Contributors can reach out to explore opportunities for infrastructure scaling and partnerships
CNCF supports the full spectrum of modern workloads—containerized, virtualized, or AI-driven—through an ecosystem of over 200 open source projects. With infrastructure support from members like Akamai, CNCF continues to enable organizations to build, run, observe, and secure workloads at scale with transparency, governance, and community at the core.