A few weeks ago at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Atlanta, the Kyverno community had the opportunity to participate in ContribFest, one of the most energizing and community-driven initiatives in the cloud-native ecosystem. While ContribFest sessions are listed on the official event calendar, many people across the broader community still don’t realize these experiences exist—let alone understand how impactful they can be for networking, learning, and truly “finding your place” within open source. Kyverno has been a longtime host of ContribFest at KubeCon, and our Atlanta event proved to be one for the books with 60+ participants joining in the fun.
ContribFest is one of the many initiatives supported by the CNCF that reflects what makes open source truly special: shared learning, collaboration across company lines, and a welcoming on-ramp for people at every stage of their cloud-native journey. As a project, Kyverno strongly believes in these types of programs, not only because they help grow individual projects, but because they also strengthen the entire cloud-native ecosystem.
Why ContribFest matters for open source
Open source thrives when people with different backgrounds, goals, and experience levels come together. ContribFest events create the perfect environment for this to happen in a way that is both inclusive and deeply practical.
At our Kyverno ContribFest event, we welcomed a wide range of participants, including:
- People new to open source who wanted to understand how projects function behind the scenes and learn to contribute to the community
- Practitioners exploring Policy as Code and evaluating Kyverno for future adoption
- Current end users refining their existing implementations and hoping to learn more advanced ways to deepen and optimize their setups
- Long-time community members and advanced adopters building complex, production-grade workflows excited to contribute to the roadmap and meet other community members for collaboration and learning opportunities
The result of this mixture of folks coming together is always the same: an experience that is enriching for everyone involved! Newcomers gain confidence, experienced users deepen their understanding and find ways to give back, and maintainers walk away seeing their work being appreciated, valued, and with a renewed energy for growth and innovation based on the invaluable feedback received from real-world environments and end users.
Sharing the Kyverno story
We kicked off the session with a brief project overview to ensure everyone, regardless of background, had a shared foundation. We introduced:
- The Kyverno maintainer team and how we collaborate
- How the project is organized and governed
- Where the repository lives and how the codebase is structured
- The many ways people can contribute beyond writing code
- How to connect with the Kyverno community and participate in discussions
This framing helped demystify open source, especially since it was the first time seeing what actually happens “on the inside” of a CNCF project for many attendees.
Three groups, three journeys
After the introduction, we split the room into three focused discussion groups based on experience level and use case.
Getting started with Policy as Code
This group explored the fundamentals of Policy as Code and Kyverno adoption. Topics included basic policy concepts, common early use cases and getting started best practices and policies, and what it looks like to introduce Kyverno inside an organization for the first time.
Intermediate use cases and CI/CD integration
This group focused on operationalizing Kyverno, with conversations around integrating policies into GitHub Actions, using Kyverno in CI/CD workflows, and improving automation and compliance across delivery pipelines.
Advanced and long-term adopters
Our final group represented experienced users with complex environments. They discussed advanced mutation, generation, performance at scale, and strategies to extend existing Kyverno deployments for broader governance needs.
Learning together, across experience levels
In the final 10 minutes of the session, each group shared back what they learned and what challenges they were facing. One of the most rewarding moments was seeing long-time Kyverno users actively mentoring newcomers, sharing lessons learned, real-world pitfalls, and best practices.
These connections don’t stop when the session ends. Many participants left with new contacts, new Slack threads, and new relationships that will continue to support them long after KubeCon.
This is exactly why ContribFest and more broadly, other CNCF community initiatives, matter so much. They create durable, human connections around shared technical challenges while promoting and teaching the end user community at large about how and why they can give back to the open source projects that give so much to them.
Community, sustainability, and the role of supporting organizations
Open source communities don’t thrive on passion alone. They also rely on sustainable support. The ability for maintainers, contributors, and community leaders to consistently show up at events like ContribFest is made possible through not just foundations like CNCF and the Linux Foundation, but also by organizations that invest in open source as part of their business and mission.
Kyverno is supported by several organizations, including Nirmata, that invest in open source by enabling engineers and maintainers to contribute time and expertise. The same is true across the entire CNCF landscape where dozens of companies contribute not just code, but also people, infrastructure, sponsorships, and community leadership.
This model, where vendor-backed projects operate in a vendor-neutral open source environment, is what allows ecosystems like CNCF to flourish at scale.
Looking ahead to Europe
The success of ContribFest in Atlanta reaffirmed what we’ve seen time and again: when people are given a welcoming space to learn and collaborate, they show up!
At Kyverno, we’ve already submitted to host another Kyverno ContribFest at KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam this spring where we hope to see even greater participation from the European cloud-native community.
For Kyverno and so many other projects, ContribFest is not a side activity, it’s core to how we grow sustainably, learn from our user community, and welcome the next generation of contributors and adopters.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Atlanta, shared their stories, asked questions, and helped make this event such a success. We hope to continue the conversation in Europe!