Proposal to spin down WG Policy

[Jim Bugwadia]

Hi Everyone,

The CNCF Kubernetes Policy WG was founded in 2018 with the charter of defining an architecture describing policy implementations and promoting standardization of best practices for policy and governance. Since then the working group, and broader community, have accomplished several key milestones related to policy management for Kubernetes:

• Published the Kubernetes Policy Management paper

• Updated the Kubernetes documentation section on Policy

• Published the Kubernetes Policy Based Governance Risk and Compliance Paper

• Created and incubated a reporting API that has been widely adopted as a standardized interface for policy engines and scanners, and now spun out into the OpenReports project.

• Provided several KubeCon talks and sessions:

• A Practical Guide To Kubernetes Policy as Code - Jim Bugwadia, Rita Zhang, Andy Suderman & Joe Betz 

• Kubernetes Policy Time Machine: Where to Next? - Jim Bugwadia, Nirmata & Andy Suderman, Fairwinds

• AI for Policy and Policy for AI! - P. Lamba, B. Kurktchiev, A. Suderman, R. Petty, J. Ray 

• Policy Matters! A Policy Working Group Introduction and Deep Dive - Jim Bugwadia & Frank Jogeleit

• PolicyReport CRD: Manage Admission Control, Runtime, and Scan Reports!

Kubernetes now also  implemented ValidatingAdmissionPolicy and MutatingAdmissionPolicy, as native API types based on the Common Expression Language (CEL). The CNCF ecosystem also continues to show healthy support for policy management with projects like Kyverno, KubeWarden, and OPA/Gatekeeper.

Working groups are intended to be time-limited, groups of people coming together to solve a cross-SIG, cross-functional challenge or question. The Working Group believes that we have achieved and surpassed the goals of our initial charter, and since we have not identified any new projects or deliverables our leads (Poonam, Andy, and I) and proposing we spin down the Kubernetes policy working group.

The working group members see a lot of interest in the topic of policy and governance, especially in new areas of AI/ML, and are planning on proposing a CNCF Community Group to continue discussions and the exchange of ideas.

I'd like to thank everyone who's been part of our community for the last several years. This has been an friendly and productive group of people coming together from many different perspectives to tackle a hard problem.

Based on lazy consensus, opening up the proposal to spin down the WG. If we don't identify a reason not to spin down, let's consider a lazy consensus resolved in 2 weeks (June 5th, 2025).

Thanks,

Jim