Akamai Cloud Credits for CNCF Projects
- Free money amount
- $1,000,000/year credit pool
- Duration
- 12 months (annual pool)
- Expiry date
- No fixed end date
- Verified
- Sep 12, 2026
Overview
Akamai, a CNCF Gold member, donates $1,000,000 in annual cloud credits to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to support open-source infrastructure, as announced in the official CNCF blog. CNCF staff allocate the credits to maintainers of CNCF projects for upstream testing, CI/CD, and related infrastructure.
What the Credits Cover
Credits can be applied to Akamai Cloud (formerly Linode) services, including compute instances, LKE and LKE Enterprise Kubernetes, object and block storage, backups, networking (NodeBalancers, VPC, firewalls), and managed MySQL/PostgreSQL databases. Allocations are scoped by CNCF based on the request.
Eligibility
- Maintainers of an official CNCF project at any maturity level (Sandbox, Incubating, or Graduated)
- Not available to personal projects, non-CNCF open-source projects, companies using CNCF projects, or end users
- Workloads must be 100% open source and must not contain sensitive or production user data
How to Request
There is no self-service signup. Requests go through the CNCF ServiceDesk and require an Atlassian account. Include the project name and CNCF link, the purpose of the infrastructure, desired Akamai services, a rough monthly cost estimate in USD, and which maintainer accounts need access. CNCF reviews and provisions resources directly.
Fair Usage
CNCF enforces strict cost discipline across all its cloud credit providers: shut down unused resources, automate scheduling, and prefer spot instances. CNCF reserves the right to terminate allocated resources for fair-use violations. AWS and Oracle offer comparable credits to CNCF projects through the same ServiceDesk.
