OCM at IndiaFOSS 2026

By Divyansh Kamboj, Payal Jain, Manoj Kumar Gupta, Kushagra Gupta, Sushilkumar Deshmukh @sudeshmu |

On the weekend of September 26–27, four of us — Divyansh Kamboj, Payal Jain, Manoj Kumar Gupta and Kushagra Gupta — ran an Open Cluster Management table at IndiaFOSS 2026, the sixth edition of FOSS United’s annual free and open source festival, held at the NIMHANS Convention Centre in Bengaluru.

Over two days, somewhere between 40 and 50 people stopped by — first-time contributors, students who had never heard of a hub-and-spoke control plane, and engineers already running fleets of Kubernetes clusters in production. This is a short write-up of what we heard.

The OCM crew at IndiaFOSS 2026

“How do I actually start contributing to a CNCF project?”

This was, by a wide margin, the most common question at the table, and most of the people asking it were students.

It is a harder question to answer well than it looks. “Pick a good first issue” is true but not very useful if you have never seen the codebase and have no mental model of what the project does. So we spent most of the weekend doing the part that comes before that: sketching out what OCM is for — registering many clusters with a hub, placing workloads across them, distributing policy and add-ons — and only then pointing at the parts of the repository where a newcomer could make a real dent.

Most visitors left with a couple of stickers and a flyer carrying a project overview and a QR code to the community page. At least one of them has already joined the community to start contributing.

The OCM table, with stickers and flyers

We also met some genuinely impressive people along the way. One first-year student had already contributed multiple patches to the Linux kernel.

The AI question

Some of the sharpest questions of the weekend came from students, and a surprising number of them were about AI.

Not “does OCM use AI” — the question was consistently about the other side of it: how do maintainers cope with AI-generated pull requests, and what happens to review capacity when the cost of opening a PR drops to near zero?

That is an open question for most open source projects right now, and we did not pretend to have a settled answer. What struck us was that newcomers were already thinking about maintainer workload as a shared resource — worrying about the reviewer’s time before they had ever submitted a patch. That is a healthy instinct, and not one we expected to spend the weekend discussing.

People already living with the problem

Not everyone at the table was new to the space. We also talked to developers from several companies who were already operating multiple clusters in production and had simply never come across OCM.

Those conversations went somewhere different. Instead of explaining what multi-cluster management is for, we went straight into architecture: the problems that start to pile up once you are managing a fleet of clusters rather than one or two, and how OCM’s hub-and-spoke model approaches them.

Hearing those problems from the people who live with them every day — rather than inferring them from issue trackers — was a highlight of the weekend.

Talking through the architecture at the table

What we took away

Three things stayed with us:

  • There is real demand for a well-lit path in. Students are actively looking for a CNCF project to contribute to. The projects that make the first hour legible are the ones that get the contributors. That is worth investing in.
  • Newcomers are thinking about maintainer load. The AI-generated-PR question came up unprompted, repeatedly, from people who had not yet made their first contribution.
  • Plenty of fleet operators have never heard of OCM. Some of the people best positioned to use the project were hearing about it for the first time at a booth. Showing up at community events is not just outreach; it is how we find out who we are missing.

Get involved

If any of the above sounds like your problem — or your weekend project — here is where to start:

New contributors are welcome, and “I stopped by your table in Bengaluru” is a perfectly good way to open a thread.

Thanks

Thanks to FOSS United for organising IndiaFOSS and for the work that goes into making it a welcoming event, to everyone who helped put the booth together, and to all 40-odd people who wandered over to ask what a hub cluster is. We hope to see some of you in a pull request.