Three CNCF Projects Gaining Traction, and Why They’re Strategic

KServe, Lima and OpenFGA are worth watching for investors

Here are three of the most interesting among the newly promoted projects in the CNCF, and why they could matter for enterprise or commercial offerings.

KServe

• As of November 2025, KServe was accepted as an incubating CNCF project. (CNCF)

• KServe offers a unified platform for scalable, multi‑framework model serving (both predictive and generative AI) on Kubernetes — making it powerful enough for enterprise‑scale AI workloads. (CNCF)

• It’s already seeing real production adoption across large enterprises in sectors from cloud infrastructure to finance — meaning there’s market demand and proven use cases. (CNCF)

• Commercial angles: managed/hosted AI‑model‑serving platforms; enterprise MLOps support and consulting; inference‑gateway as a service; hybrid‑cloud or multi‑cloud hosting backed by KServe.

Lima

• In November 2025, Lima was promoted to incubating status by CNCF. (CNCF)

• Lima provides lightweight Linux VMs optimized for running containers (e.g. containerd, Docker, Podman) — originally targeted at local dev environments but extending to secure isolation for AI workloads (e.g., sandboxing coding agents). (CNCF)

• Commercial angles: secure local‑dev VM hosting; enterprise sandboxing platforms (e.g. for dev teams, AI‑agent containment, compliance); desktop‑to‑cloud developer tools; managed desktop‑to‑Kubernetes integration services.

OpenFGA

• Also accepted into CNCF incubation in November 2025. (CNCF)

• OpenFGA is an authorization engine designed to implement complex, relationship-based access control (ReBAC) at scale — helping externalize and centralize authorization logic rather than embedding in each application. (CNCF)

• Since its Sandbox adoption, it’s already deployed by hundreds of companies. (CNCF)

• Commercial angles: hosted (SaaS) authorization / identity‑access management; enterprise-grade SLAs and support; consulting or integration services for complex distributed systems; add‑on modules (monitoring, auditing, compliance).