Multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes orchestration project reaches production maturity as global enterprises scale AI training and inference across hybrid infrastructure SHANGHAI, China – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026 – September 8, 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.