Gianluca Arbezzano is a full stack developer at InfluxDB, a Docker captain and contributor and maintainer of different oss projects. Passionate about modern monitoring and furthering cloud native technologies, Gianluca recently wrote about his first experience with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
What and how Cloud Native Computing Foundation
DevOps, automation, scalability, high availability, cloud computing, containers, microservices. These are not only buzzwords, but technology or concepts that a lot of companies are trying to achieve to make a product stable, available or easy to maintain.
The common layers above all of these terms is open source, community, and open code.
I discovered the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) a few months ago, and I love being involved and getting people involved in communities.
The CNCF is under of the Linux Foundation and focuses on furthering cloud native technologies.
Cloud is also one of my favorite topics. I love to implement and design scalable, highly available, easy-to-maintain architecture with the best and perfect tools for you and your company.
I am writing this article to give you an overview of the CNCF because joining them required a good effort. I hope that this article can help explain what they are doing and also give you motivation to help us in our mission.
First of all, you need to look on the site cncf.io or the github account.
CNCF is helping to shape the evolution of technologies that are container packaged, dynamically scheduled and microservices oriented. CNCF is a non-profit organization that provides open source projects and industry-proven best practices to help organizations build, deploy and run critical applications natively in any cloud.
Kubernetes, containerd, Prometheus, gRPC are just some of the big names. Right now, there are 10 projects under the Foundation, and nearly every month the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) reviews proposals from projects hoping to join the Foundation.
You can follow the TOC activity on GitHub (https://github.com/cncf/toc) and on their respective mailing list: https://lists.cncf.io/mailman/listinfo/cncf-toc.
What services does CNCF provide to its projects? Marketing, community management, and governance and IP expertise, all designed to manage, grow and sustain open source projects. CNCF also organizes conferences and training events like workshops or webinars.
There are different working groups (wg) trying to improve different common areas related to cloud native. Here is sampling:
- ci-wg: Continuous Integration working group
- Storage-wg
- Networking-wg
- Serverless-wg
There is a repositories for each with issues to discuss about topics and organize next steps.
Mission
CNCF exists to create and drive the adoption of a new computing paradigm that is optimized for modern distributed systems environments capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self healing multi-tenant nodes.
This is the mission from the cncf.io web site. As a Foundation, the organization provides a neutral home for projects to come together to foster growth and interoperability.
Google contributed Kubernetes and gRPC, CoreOS recently contributed rkt, and Docker recently moved containerd to CNCF. In each case, these projects were voted in by the TOC, which makes sure new projects are within the scope for CNCF set by the Governing Board.
Contribute
Are you interested in getting involved? There are many different ways and mailing lists:
- cncf-toc is the technical oversight committee. Sign up to receive invites to follow the bi-weekly meetings about CNCF technical project news.
- Become a contributor to one of the projects, they are all open source.
- Attend or host a Meetup and connect at an event.
- Stay up to date on news and info from CNCF by subscribing to its newsletter, joining the slack channel or mailing lists and reading the CNCF blog.
- Join as a paying CNCF member.
- Companies that use cloud native technologies, but do not offer cloud native services can become a CNCF End User member.
- If you are passionate about CI, serverless, networking, or storage you can also join the working groups.
You’ll meet a lot of other dynamic and great people who can help you in practice and share great experiences and ideas.
How it works
You can join as a CNCF member, but the CNCF technical community is open to all. As a democratic movement they usually ask people to share opinions about what the CNCF is doing or about the new projects that request to join the Foundation. But there is a group of people who can actually vote on all the project proposals; this group is the TOC and is called the “technical oversight committee.”
The group meets via conference call on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month at 8AM PT (USA Pacific). The calls are open to all and presentations are emailed out to the mailing list (https://lists.cncf.io/mailman/listinfo/cncf-toc) the day before the call. Anyone can join the mailing list and the calls. The calls usually consist of updates from the working groups, presentations from prospective projects (including a short demo) sharing how their technology works, why it is interested in joining the Foundation, etc. Here is a public Google calendar you can add the meetings to your calendar: https://goo.gl/eyutah.
Why you need to be part of the CNCF
As a developer, you will join other smart people who are working with the best technologies and a lot of them are actually building them.
If you are passionate about cloud and scalability, it is a very good way to stay in touch with news and trends that will become important for products and companies over the world.
As a company, it is a good way to understand how modern tools can change how your projects evolve and how to make your environment stable, flexible and up-to-date with the best technologies. Events and conferences cover the most important topics with the biggest use cases available right now. It’s a good way to be inspired in a sector that changes so often. It’s also one of the best places to hire the best employees involved in open source projects with a high impact for a lot of developers and companies.
CNCF’s next event is CloudNativeCon + KubeCon North America taking place December 6-8 in Austin.
Conclusion
Our sector is so dynamic, it changes fast and frequently. You need to be part of the best communities and follow the right sources to stay up to date. CNCF is a good place to be in touch with the latest developments and to improve your development and human skills.
Interested in hearing Gianluca Arbezzano discuss OpenTracing, modern monitoring, and the CNCF OpenMonitoring initiative? Check out these upcoming events in Italy:
Originally posted on GitHub.