The mentorship flywheel: How CNCF is growing the next generation of cloud native leaders

2025: A record year for cloud native mentorship Mariam Fahmy: A case study in the flywheel Finding Kyverno The mentorship experience Ten months to Maintainer The flywheel in action Why this matters Advice for aspiring contributors Get involved Posted on December 18, 2025 by Nate Waddington, Head of Mentorship & Documentation at CNCF A record year for mentorship, 187 graduates contributing to the ecosystem, and one engineer’s journey from “I didn’t know about Docker” to Kyverno maintainer. In 2025, the CNCF mentorship programs hit a milestone: 187 successful mentorship projects—a record cohort. But the real story isn’t in the numbers alone. It’s in what happens after the mentorship ends. This year, we’ve been tracking something we call the “mentorship flywheel”—the virtuous cycle where mentees become contributors, contributors become maintainers, and maintainers become mentors who bring in the next generation. The data tells a compelling story, but so do the individuals behind it. One of them is Mariam Fahmy. Her path from complete newcomer to Kyverno maintainer in under a year illustrates exactly what structured mentorship can achieve—and why it matters for the long-term health of open source. The mentorship programs CNCF participates in—spanning LFX Mentorship, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy—have grown steadily since 2021. This year’s 187 projects represent not just quantity, but breadth: mentees contributed to everything from Linkerd and Kubernetes to Istio, KubeEdge, and dozens of other projects across the CNCF landscape. The numbers tell a story of sustained engagement and accelerating growth. CNCF LFX Mentee contributions have increased dramatically year over year—from nearly 10,000 in 2021 to 40,000 in 2025.