Getting accepted into the CNCF Sandbox is a milestone — but nobody tells you about the months of governance restructuring, community alignment, and uncomfortable technical decisions that precede it. This talk pulls back the curtain on what the journey actually looks like from a maintainer who went through it.

I'll walk through the concrete steps, the surprises, and the mistakes: aligning project governance with foundation expectations, adapting a contribution model that had worked fine for years, navigating due diligence questions we weren't prepared for, and the technical changes required to meet cloud-native standards. I'll also cover what changed after acceptance — more contributors, more visibility, and more responsibility than we expected.

Attendees will leave with:
- A realistic, step-by-step roadmap for submitting an open-source project to the CNCF Sandbox
- The governance, licensing, and community structure decisions that foundations actually evaluate
- An honest assessment of the benefits and new obligations — so you can decide if it's worth it for your project