Nirmata is the enterprise commercial platform built on Kyverno, the open-source Kubernetes policy engine that Nirmata created and donated to the CNCF in November 2020. Kyverno has over 3.2 billion downloads.
Kyverno implements policy as Kubernetes custom resources using YAML and CEL, meaning policies are created, versioned, and audited with the same tooling as any other Kubernetes object. The engine runs as an admission controller intercepting resource creation and modification requests. It also runs background scans against existing resources — a distinction from Kubernetes native ValidatingAdmissionPolicy, which only fires on changes. Kyverno 1.16 (November 2025) introduced CEL-based policies in beta.
Nirmata Control Hub, the commercial layer, adds centralized management across multiple clusters: a dashboard, policy lifecycle versioning, compliance reporting, automated remediation agents, and an AI Copilot for natural-language policy authoring. It supports EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, OpenShift, and air-gapped on-premises Kubernetes distributions.