Kyverno Graduates from CNCF: A Production Guide to Policy-as-Code for Kubernetes Governance

Kyverno Graduates from CNCF: A Production Guide to Policy-as-Code for Kubernetes Governance On March 24, 2026, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam, the CNCF officially announced Kyverno's graduation to the highest project maturity level. Kyverno is a Kubernetes-native policy engine that lets you define policies in standard YAML without learning a specialized language like Rego. It has been battle-tested at enterprise scale — LinkedIn processes over 20,000 admission requests per minute across 230+ clusters with 500K+ nodes, and organizations including Bloomberg, Coinbase, Deutsche Telekom, Spotify, and Vodafone rely on it in production. Policy-as-Code is no longer optional. As clusters multiply into the hundreds and AI workloads become mainstream, manual security reviews and configuration audits simply cannot keep up. This guide covers Kyverno 1.17's core features, CEL-based policy authoring, production deployment strategies, and practical comparisons with OPA/Gatekeeper. 1.