News
What happened
A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together... A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) , the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together to run a 10-week mentorship cohort together. We called it a “structured contributor pipeline.” We weren’t sure exactly what we’d learn. Now that the cohort has wrapped, we have results – and they’re worth sharing. What actually happened 48 Bloomberg engineers participated in the initiative. Most had never contributed to open source before. Some came in with deep OTel experience. Here’s what the cohort contributed to the project over the course of 10 weeks: 118 pull requests (PRs) were submitted to the OpenTelemetry project . 70 were merged – accepted into the global codebase by the worldwide maintainer community. Contributions spanned 11 repositories : the Collector , Python SDK , Go SDK , Erlang SDK , Rust SDK , opentelemetry.io , the OTel Demo , instrumentation libraries, the Ecosystem Explorer , and more. 842 volunteer hours were logged by participants During this timeframe, the OpenTelemetry project also reached its own milestone: it achieved fully graduated status within the CNCF , placing it alongside Kubernetes as one of the most trusted open source projects in the world. What the contributions actually looked like The work done was consequential. The Bloomberg engineers spent time identifying and working on crucial project maintenance – the kind that matters. Florian Bourgey of Bloomberg’s Quant Research team in the firm’s Office of the CTO systematically worked through a renaming camp
A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together... A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) , the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together to run a 10-week mentorship cohort together. We called it a “structured contributor pipeline.” We weren’t sure exactly what we’d learn. Now that the cohort has wrapped, we have results – and they’re worth sharing. What actually happened 48 Bloomberg engineers participated in the initiative. Most had never contributed to open source before. Some came in with deep OTel experience. Here’s what the cohort contributed to the project over the course of 10 weeks: 118 pull requests (PRs) were submitted to the OpenTelemetry project . 70 were merged – accepted into the global codebase by the worldwide maintainer community. Contributions spanned 11 repositories : the Collector , Python SDK , Go SDK , Erlang SDK , Rust SDK , opentelemetry.io , the OTel Demo , instrumentation libraries, the Ecosystem Explorer , and more. 842 volunteer hours were logged by participants During this timeframe, the OpenTelemetry project also reached its own milestone: it achieved fully graduated status within the CNCF , placing it alongside Kubernetes as one of the most trusted open source projects in the world. What the contributions actually looked like The work done was consequential. The Bloomberg engineers spent time identifying and working on crucial project maintenance – the kind that matters. Florian Bourgey of Bloomberg’s Quant Research team in the firm’s Office of the CTO systematically worked through a renaming campaign in the OTel Demo repository , submitting 23 pull requests – all of which were merged – that standardized telemetry attribute naming across the entire project (see issue #3267 ). By the end of the 10-week initiative, he had become the #2 most prolific contributor to the OTel Demo. This is exactly the kind of high-leverage, high-toil work for which open source project maintainers rarely have bandwidth. Engineers Thomas Baldwin, Mikiyas Bokan, and Larry Zebaze of Bloomberg’s Public Cloud Observability engineering team brought a real problem from their work into the open source community: the OTel Collector’s static secret storage required full restarts when credentials rotated. Seeing an opportunity to solve this challenge and contribute the solution upstream, they filed a community issue and built a multi-cloud credential rotation extension for the Collector — covering AWS , GCP , and Azure . Their work is still in review by the project maintainers, but will outlast the cohort in a meaningful way that benefits the greater OTel user base. Others contributed bug fixes to Python instrumentation , documentation improvements across opentelemetry.io , reference applications in JavaScript and Python (FastAPI) , C++ code health fixes , Go SDK improvements , and tooling that will help future contributors work across multi-repo Python environments . Not all of their contributions were code. Several participants spent their volunteer hours reading spec documents, triaging issues, reviewing PRs they didn’t author, and asking questions that led other contributors to the right answers. That work matters too. What the mentors observed The OpenTelemetry community brought extraordinary generosity to this cohort – seven maintainers from around the globe who volunteered their own time week after week to answer questions, review code, and unblock stuck contributors. Each week brought a different deep dive to help educate the volunteers about the OTel project: semantic conventions and Weaver , the OTel Demo, GenAI observability, the Collector architecture, the path from contributor to maintainer, and more. Juraci Paixão Kröhling , a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee , reflected on the experience at the final session: “This is one of the most successful mentorship programs I have seen at CNCF.” Liudmila Molkova of Grafana Labs, who led our GenAI observability session, offered advice that resonated across the cohort: “Find something applicable to your actual work that also helps your main job – otherwise it’s not sustainable.” She also reframed how contributors should think about their impact: “Reviews are more important than contributions. If you consistently provide comments, I’d be happy to promote you to Approver.” Kemal Akkoyun , who led a deep dive on contributing to the OTel Collector, gave contributors a practical framework for getting work landed: “Signal intent before you write code – open an issue, describe the problem clearly, get alignment before spending time on a PR.” And for those just getting started: “Start small. A focused, well-scoped PR with a clear problem description moves faster than a large one. Small PRs give you a ‘dopamine hit’ and help you understand the process.” Martin Thwaites , who joined for the semantic conventions session, reminded participants that contribution takes many forms: “Share your experience, not just opinions – practical feedback is the most valuable contribution to these standards. Lurking at meetings counts as contributing.” Pierre Tessier tracked every cohort PR closely and celebrated individual contributor journeys – including noting that Florian Bourgey had gone from his first PR to the second-largest human contributor to the OTel Demo in just a few weeks. Severin Neumann closed the series with a message to participants and mentors alike: “Close what can be closed, me
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Changes at a glance
What's new
A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together... A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) , the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together to run a 10-week mentorship cohort together. We called it a “structured contributor pipeline.” We weren’t sure exactly what we’d learn. Now that the cohort has wrapped, we have results – and they’re worth sharing. What actually happened 48 Bloomberg engineers participated in the initiative. Most had never contributed to open source before. Some came in with deep OTel experience. Here’s what the cohort contributed to the project over the course of 10 weeks: 118 pull requests (PRs) were submitted to the OpenTelemetry project . 70 were merged – accepted into the global codebase by the worldwide maintainer community. Contributions spanned 11 repositories : the Collector , Python SDK , Go SDK , Erlang SDK , Rust SDK , opentelemetry.io , the OTel Demo , instrumentation libraries, the Ecosystem Explorer , and more. 842 volunteer hours were logged by participants During this timeframe, the OpenTelemetry project also reached its own milestone: it achieved fully graduated status within the CNCF , placing it alongside Kubernetes as one of the most trusted open source projects in the world. What the contributions actually looked like The work done was consequential. The Bloomberg engineers spent time identifying and working on crucial project maintenance – the kind that matters. Florian Bourgey of Bloomberg’s Quant Research team in the firm’s Office of the CTO systematically worked through a renaming campaign in the OTel Demo repository , submitting 23 pull requests – all of which were merged – that standardized telemetry attribute naming across the entire project (see issue #3267 ). By the end of the 10-week initiative, he had become the #2 most prolific contributor to the OTel Demo. This is exactly the kind of high-leverage, high-toil work for which open source project maintainers rarely have bandwidth. Engineers Thomas Baldwin, Mikiyas Bokan, and Larry Zebaze of Bloomberg’s Public Cloud Observability engineering team brought a real problem from their work into the open source community: the OTel Collector’s static secret storage required full restarts when credentials rotated. Seeing an opportunity to solve this challenge and contribute the solution upstream, they filed a community issue and built a multi-cloud credential rotation extension for the Collector — covering AWS , GCP , and Azure . Their work is still in review by the project maintainers, but will outlast the cohort in a meaningful way that benefits the greater OTel user base. Others contributed bug fixes to Python instrumentation , documentation improvements across opentelemetry.io , reference applications in JavaScript and Python (FastAPI) , C++ code health fixes , Go SDK improvements , and tooling that will help future contributors work across multi-repo Python environments . Not all of their contributions were code. Several participants spent their volunteer hours reading spec documents, triaging issues, reviewing PRs they didn’t author, and asking questions that led other contributors to the right answers. That work matters too. What the mentors observed The OpenTelemetry community brought extraordinary generosity to this cohort – seven maintainers from around the globe who volunteered their own time week after week to answer questions, review code, and unblock stuck contributors. Each week brought a different deep dive to help educate the volunteers about the OTel project: semantic conventions and Weaver , the OTel Demo, GenAI observability, the Collector architecture, the path from contributor to maintainer, and more. Juraci Paixão Kröhling , a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee , reflected on the experience at the final session: “This is one of the most successful mentorship programs I have seen at CNCF.” Liudmila Molkova of Grafana Labs, who led our GenAI observability session, offered advice that resonated across the cohort: “Find something applicable to your actual work that also helps your main job – otherwise it’s not sustainable.” She also reframed how contributors should think about their impact: “Reviews are more important than contributions. If you consistently provide comments, I’d be happy to promote you to Approver.” Kemal Akkoyun , who led a deep dive on contributing to the OTel Collector, gave contributors a practical framework for getting work landed: “Signal intent before you write code – open an issue, describe the problem clearly, get alignment before spending time on a PR.” And for those just getting started: “Start small. A focused, well-scoped PR with a clear problem description moves faster than a large one. Small PRs give you a ‘dopamine hit’ and help you understand the process.” Martin Thwaites , who joined for the semantic conventions session, reminded participants that contribution takes many forms: “Share your experience, not just opinions – practical feedback is the most valuable contribution to these standards. Lurking at meetings counts as contributing.” Pierre Tessier tracked every cohort PR closely and celebrated individual contributor journeys – including noting that Florian Bourgey had gone from his first PR to the second-largest human contributor to the OTel Demo in just a few weeks. Severin Neumann closed the series with a message to participants and mentors alike: “Close what can be closed, me
Breaking changes
No breaking changes were reported in the source material.
Analysis
In detail
A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together... A follow-up to our earlier post: “Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from Dependency Management to Stewardship” *** In April 2026, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) , the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, and Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office came together to run a 10-week mentorship cohort together. We called it a “structured contributor pipeline.” We weren’t sure exactly what we’d learn. Now that the cohort has wrapped, we have results – and they’re worth sharing. What actually happened 48 Bloomberg engineers participated in the initiative. Most had never contributed to open source before. Some came in with deep OTel experience. Here’s what the cohort contributed to the project over the course of 10 weeks: 118 pull requests (PRs) were submitted to the OpenTelemetry project . 70 were merged – accepted into the global codebase by the worldwide maintainer community. Contributions spanned 11 repositories : the Collector , Python SDK , Go SDK , Erlang SDK , Rust SDK , opentelemetry.io , the OTel Demo , instrumentation libraries, the Ecosystem Explorer , and more. 842 volunteer hours were logged by participants During this timeframe, the OpenTelemetry project also reached its own milestone: it achieved fully graduated status within the CNCF , placing it alongside Kubernetes as one of the most trusted open source projects in the world. What the contributions actually looked like The work done was consequential. The Bloomberg engineers spent time identifying and working on crucial project maintenance – the kind that matters. Florian Bourgey of Bloomberg’s Quant Research team in the firm’s Office of the CTO systematically worked through a renaming campaign in the OTel Demo repository , submitting 23 pull requests – all of which were merged – that standardized telemetry attribute naming across the entire project (see issue #3267 ). By the end of the 10-week initiative, he had become the #2 most prolific contributor to the OTel Demo. This is exactly the kind of high-leverage, high-toil work for which open source project maintainers rarely have bandwidth. Engineers Thomas Baldwin, Mikiyas Bokan, and Larry Zebaze of Bloomberg’s Public Cloud Observability engineering team brought a real problem from their work into the open source community: the OTel Collector’s static secret storage required full restarts when credentials rotated. Seeing an opportunity to solve this challenge and contribute the solution upstream, they filed a community issue and built a multi-cloud credential rotation extension for the Collector — covering AWS , GCP , and Azure . Their work is still in review by the project maintainers, but will outlast the cohort in a meaningful way that benefits the greater OTel user base. Others contributed bug fixes to Python instrumentation , documentation improvements across opentelemetry.io , reference applications in JavaScript and Python (FastAPI) , C++ code health fixes , Go SDK improvements , and tooling that will help future contributors work across multi-repo Python environments . Not all of their contributions were code. Several participants spent their volunteer hours reading spec documents, triaging issues, reviewing PRs they didn’t author, and asking questions that led other contributors to the right answers. That work matters too. What the mentors observed The OpenTelemetry community brought extraordinary generosity to this cohort – seven maintainers from around the globe who volunteered their own time week after week to answer questions, review code, and unblock stuck contributors. Each week brought a different deep dive to help educate the volunteers about the OTel project: semantic conventions and Weaver , the OTel Demo, GenAI observability, the Collector architecture, the path from contributor to maintainer, and more. Juraci Paixão Kröhling , a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee , reflected on the experience at the final session: “This is one of the most successful mentorship programs I have seen at CNCF.” Liudmila Molkova of Grafana Labs, who led our GenAI observability session, offered advice that resonated across the cohort: “Find something applicable to your actual work that also helps your main job – otherwise it’s not sustainable.” She also reframed how contributors should think about their impact: “Reviews are more important than contributions. If you consistently provide comments, I’d be happy to promote you to Approver.” Kemal Akkoyun , who led a deep dive on contributing to the OTel Collector, gave contributors a practical framework for getting work landed: “Signal intent before you write code – open an issue, describe the problem clearly, get alignment before spending time on a PR.” And for those just getting started: “Start small. A focused, well-scoped PR with a clear problem description moves faster than a large one. Small PRs give you a ‘dopamine hit’ and help you understand the process.” Martin Thwaites , who joined for the semantic conventions session, reminded participants that contribution takes many forms: “Share your experience, not just opinions – practical feedback is the most valuable contribution to these standards. Lurking at meetings counts as contributing.” Pierre Tessier tracked every cohort PR closely and celebrated individual contributor journeys – including noting that Florian Bourgey had gone from his first PR to the second-largest human contributor to the OTel Demo in just a few weeks. Severin Neumann closed the series with a message to participants and mentors alike: “Close what can be closed, me
Why it matters
If you run self-hosted infrastructure, homelab services, or automation stacks, this update is worth tracking before you change production.
Homelab impact
If you run related services in your homelab, review whether this update affects your current deployment. Check compatibility with your Docker Compose files, reverse proxy config, or network setup before you upgrade production stacks.
What to do next
Practical steps for operators running self-hosted stacks.
This brief covers what you need from CNCF Blog's reporting. Visit the original post for release notes, changelogs, and full technical documentation.