Daniel Krook of the CNCF on what projects need

Who Daniel Krook is

Daniel Krook is Senior Director of Developer Experience at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Asked to introduce the job, Daniel called the title “a long way of saying” that the team, Bob Killen included, makes sure the projects the CNCF hosts are happy and have what they need to thrive: support, cloud credits, technical documentation, mentorship and the other benefits of being part of the foundation.

At the time of recording that meant about 230 projects, with roughly ten more voted in and still completing the process.

The conversation

Daniel sat down with the show at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague on 8 October 2026, alongside Bob Killen, the CNCF’s Director of Technical Program Management. The conversation runs about fifteen minutes and covers how a CNCF project grows up, what AI agents ask of Kubernetes, and what comes next for the foundation.

How a project grows up

The CNCF has three maturity levels. Around 40 projects are graduated, the most mature; around 40 are incubating, building momentum and communities; behind them is a long tail in sandbox. Another 30 to 40 have been archived, superseded by something else or no longer relevant. Counting everything that has ever joined, the foundation is past 250.

Who decides which project moves up is not the developer experience team but the Technical Oversight Committee: eleven people elected from the governing board, the maintainers and the end users, each bringing a view of what makes a project healthy enough to be depended on as critical infrastructure. The TOC sets the criteria and runs the reviews.

For a maintainer, the basics are concrete: a code of conduct that is actually enforced, proper licensing, good documentation and transparent governance, so newcomers can see how to join. The sandbox application is a public GitHub issue, which means anyone can read the template before applying and see what the TOC will ask: how the project relates to the others, what unique problem it solves and how it fits into the ecosystem.

The new projects for agents

The part of the conversation that is clearly Daniel’s is about security, and about how the ecosystem absorbs a new kind of workload. Much of what agents need has already been solved in Kubernetes, which gives a solid foundation. What is new arrives as projects: the most recent sandbox review included a couple of security projects for isolating agents, and gVisor, which has isolated containers for years, is being extended specifically to isolate agents.

We’ve got the traditional primitives, and then these brand new projects coming in that are solving these emerging problems.

— Daniel Krook

That is the pattern worth noticing as a platform team. The CNCF does not pick winners. New problems show up as new sandbox projects next to the established ones, and the end users’ reference architectures, contributed to the foundation, show which combinations people actually run.

Where to go next

The written interview with Bob and Daniel on lucaberton.com, linked at the top of this page, has more detail, and so does Bob Killen’s own article, on what agents do to the load. For the CNCF as a whole, and everyone the show has interviewed there, see the CNCF on Udienza.