Is CNCF all about Kubernetes?
If you’re among those who are new to CNCF/ KubeCon/ Kubernetes and grappling with understanding CNCF’s role in the realm of open source, this is for you. Many newcomers initially attend and see KubeCon or CNCF as solely centered around Kubernetes, and if you share this impression, fret not! I too once held similar beliefs.
My journey 🚀 navigating this maze led me to pen down this article that addresses this doubt and provides explanation to following questions:
- What is CNCF? How CNCF relates toKubernetes?
- How CNCF organizes itself?
- What are CNCF projects? (other than Kubernetes 😉😉😉)
What is CNCF?
First thing first CNCF is Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a non profit organization founded in 2015. It was founded with aim to standardize the growing needs and software stack of various open source projects around cloud native technologies. It is responsible for standardizing, nurturing, promoting and gradually maturing various open source projects and technology ecosystem in most vendor neurtal way. It provides guidelines, architectures, definitions, standards, actual project releases around cloud native technologies. This is the reason that within so little time of its inception CNCF has grown in leaps and bounds and further becoming harbinger of cloud native world. Read here if you want to know the complete charter of CNCF.
Linux foundation and CNCF: How are they different?
Another common confusion is how Linux Foundation and CNCF linked? Are they same or different? So here is the brief answer — CNCF is an offshoot of Linux Foundation organization. In a way its baby of Linux foundation. Linux foundation is an old organization and was founded in year 2000 with the need to support and promote various open source technologies around Linux. However with time Linux Foundation has become much more than Linux. It takes care of various sub arms of open source technologies that can be segregated in security, networking, cloud and many more areas. Out of that CNCF is responsible for owning cloud portion of open source projects. For comprehensive list of projects under Linux Foundation refer here.
Is CNCF all about Kubernetes?
Is CNCF all about Kubernetes? — well short answer to this is no.
Definitely Kubernetes is the one of the first and the most popular project that graduated from CNCF and still growing. Brief history of Kubernetes is that it started as an internal project within Google. In year 2015 Google decided to donate this project to CNCF at the time of CNCF inception. Since Kubernetes adopted by CNCF it has grown in leaps and bounds and still growing with loads of contribution from open source community. It has become industry standard on which many more managed Kubernetes services have been laid out by companies like Red Hat, IBM, Google, AWS, Azure and more. However again to reiterate CNCF is not just Kubernetes and its much more than that. It is the flag bearer for Cloud Native innovation and it has multiple projects apart from Kubernetes.
How CNCF organizes itself?
Due to its size and enthusiastic open source contribution this organization is already very big. That makes it difficult to understand how CNCF organizes itself. Read on and refer this diagram below if you want to understand more about internal workings of CNCF:
CNCF Structure
- Governance board — It is responsible for marketing and other business oversight and budget decisions for the CNCF.
- Technical Oversight committee (TOC) — The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community. These are group of 11 top technical architects. They define and maintain the technical vision of CNCF. They play major role in CNCF owned projects start from decision to accept, maintain and nurture the project. Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs ) are represented by large number of open source Contributors and organizations spread across various CNCF projects and decision making process. There are explained further in article.
- End User Community — It comprises of top companies and startups (currently 140+) that are committed to accelerating the adoption of cloud native technologies and improving the deployment experience.
CNCF Groups
There are various groups that actively work with in CNCF to make things reality. Some of the common groups:
- CNCF organizes its project related work and releases by Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
- SIG focuses on specific problem/ project and specific approaches to solve those problems and contribute upstream
- SIG often further organizes themselves into sub projects for separation and work focus
- Various SIGs are monitored and lead under the guidance of TOC (Technical oversight committee) members
- There are another set of groups that exist in CNCF ecosystem and they are called Working Groups (WGs). These are set of active groups which are purpose build for various discussions and decisions related to various topics such as brainstorming, thoughtful decision making. governance etc.
Communication
CNCF is very active and open in all their communications. Broadly this enthusiastic open source community uses following primary modes of communication:
- Slack Channels: Slack is the primary mode of communication for various projects, SIGs, WGs and for various events that CNCF organizes. Refer this link to join slack workspace of CNCF and then within that workspace you can search and join various slack channels as per your choice, interest and intent to learn and contribute.
- Groups and Mailing lists: Once you decide which technology or initiative or function you are interested in then accordingly you can become part of various groups and mailing lists where active communication between group members happen. Refer this link for CNCF sub-groups and mailing lists.
- Events: CNCF is a vast community where various organizations, end users and contributors actively participate, create stuff and exchange information. In order to foster culture of openly sharing and learning with each other, CNCF often organizes various events on regular basis at global and local scale. Refer this link for Linux Foundation/ CNCF events upcoming and recent ones.
CNCF Projects
It owns lots of projects either born in-house or donated by other organizations or open source groups. These projects go through various stages to be accepted and move up from one maturity level to another. Typical project maturity stages are:
- Graduated project — These are projects which are matured enough and evolved for wider industry utilization and adoption. Such projects have continuous releases that are adopted by companies on continuous basis for their managed offerings. Most popular of those graduated projects are Kubernetes, CoreDNS, Helm, Prometheus and few others.
- Incubating project — These are projects that are promising and successfully completed criteria laid out by TOC and able to make their space to incubating stage. ETCD, CNI, CRI-O and many other are popular incubating projects that are already used in production and adopted by managed platform and product companies.
- Sandbox project — These are projects which are new born ideas and needs to be tested out before deciding on fate of those idea. On this writing some of the popular sandbox projects are k3s, kubevirt, longhorn etc.
- Archived project — These are those projects which don’t show enough traction, growth and ideation getting converted to anything substantial. Those projects are retired and moved to archived stage by CNCF on recommendation from TOC.
CNCF appoints and take help from Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) members to monitor and guide projects in all above stages very closely and once all criteria are met then they decided to move projects from one stage to the another as mentioned above. For the complete list of CNCF owned projects refer here.
