OpenFGA Accepted into CNCF Incubation 🎉

OpenFGA has been accepted as a CNCF Incubation project! The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to advance OpenFGA from Sandbox to Incubation status, recognizing years of community work and real-world adoption. This places OpenFGA on the same maturity path as other CNCF projects like OpenTelemetry, Keycloak, Artifact Hub, and Backstage. Learn more at the CNCF joint announcement: OpenFGA becomes a CNCF Incubating Project.

Why Incubation Matters

Incubation signals that OpenFGA is production-ready with a healthy, diverse contributor base and real-world adoption at scale. For organizations evaluating OpenFGA, this milestone validates the project's maturity, governance, and long-term sustainability. The CNCF due diligence process assessed our security posture, documentation, community health, and adoption metrics—all meeting the standards required for broad enterprise use.

Learn more about CNCF project stages and review our due diligence documentation.

Technical Maturity Since Sandbox

Since joining CNCF as a Sandbox project in December 2022, OpenFGA has evolved significantly:

• Performance improvements: Substantial optimizations in query execution and caching, enabling sub-millisecond authorization checks at scale
• Enhanced capabilities: Introduction of conditional tuples, modular models, and list users functionality to support more complex authorization scenarios
• Expanded ecosystem: New SDKs, database adapters (including SQLite), Terraform provider, and IDE plugins
• Production hardening: Improved observability, configuration options, and operational tooling based on real-world deployment feedback
• Security posture: Comprehensive security assessments, vulnerability management processes, and regular dependency updates

These improvements reflect our commitment to building a reliable, performant authorization system ready for enterprise production use.

How We Got Here

OpenFGA was open sourced in June 2022 and accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project in December 2022. Since then, we've seen incredible community support:

• Regular community meetings since 2022, available on our YouTube channel, along with more than 40 presentations from community members.
• Contributions from the community—whether through questions, feedback, feature requests, PRs, bug reports, or guides and tools built around OpenFGA.
• Grafana Labs joined the maintainer team.
• 600+ contributors across the OpenFGA organization.
• 5,000+ GitHub stars across our repositories.
• Presence at six consecutive KubeCon conferences (US and EU) with breakout sessions and a kiosk.
• Production adopters include Canonical, Docker, Grafana Labs, Read AI, Agicap, Headspace, Zuplo, Sourcegraph, OpenObserve and LakeKeeper along with many others.
• Several adopters went on the record in interviews with CNCF around their OpenFGA experience through the due diligence project.

Thank You

OpenFGA's success is the result of contributions from many individuals and organizations. We want to highlight a few who made significant impact:

Community Contributors

• Massimiliano Gori believed in OpenFGA early and led integration across Canonical.
• Pauline Jamin spearheaded adoption at Agicap and presented their learnings at KubeCon Europe 2024.
• JT aka Hawxy has been maintaining Fga.net for years, and has been graciously providing us feedback since.
• Andrew Powers led Read AI implementation supporting collaboration and RAG for enterprise search.
• Joao Guerreiro led the implementation at Grafana and presented their journey at KubeCon Europe 2025.
• Dan Cech from Grafana contributed the SQLite adapter and serves as a maintainer.
• Nathan Totten led Zuplo integration, implementing authorization at the edge for the API gateway.
• Gurleen Sethi led the implementation of organization and team management at Docker, Inc.
• Siddhant Khare was the first independent contributor who onboarded as a maintainer of the OpenFGA project.
• Maurice Ackel donated the OpenFGA Terraform Provider, and joined as a maintainer.
• Yann D'Isanto from Agicap, who contributed the JetBrains IDE plugin.
• Martin Besozzi has been involved in the OpenFGA community from the beginning, driving integrations with Keycloak.

CNCF Support

• Chris Aniszczyk helped guide the project donation and acceptance.
• Eddie Knight, Evan Anderson, Marina Moore and Justin Cappos from CNCF TAG Security supported the self-assessment and helped strengthen our posture for due diligence.
• Karena Angell and Faseela K helped us navigate the due diligence process and carried much of the heavy lift to make it happen.

What's Next

Incubation is a milestone, not a destination. Our focus continues on:

• Performance: Optimizing latency and throughput for large-scale deployments
• Developer Experience: Enhanced tooling, IDE plugins, and debugging capabilities
• Integrations: Expanding our ecosystem with more identity providers, frameworks, and platforms
• Documentation: Comprehensive guides, tutorials, and real-world implementation patterns
• Governance: Strengthening our contributor pathways and security practices

Our next milestone: CNCF Graduation. Track our progress on the project roadmap.

Get Involved

This achievement belongs to every contributor, user, and community member who has supported OpenFGA. Thank you for being part of our journey!

New to OpenFGA? Start here:

• Try OpenFGA locally and explore the documentation
• Join our CNCF Slack community to ask questions and connect with users

Already using OpenFGA?

• Star the repo and follow development
• Share your adoption story—add your organization to our ADOPTERS.md
• Check out the roadmap and contribute to upcoming features