End user post by Alolita Sharma, Engineering Leader at Apple, CNCF Board & EndUser TAB, OpenTelemetry GC, CNCF Observability TAG Co-Chair
The CNCF End User Technical Advisory Group (TAB) was formally announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 in Chicago last year. The TAB is one of the three central governing pillars of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
TAB Mission
The mission of the TAB includes representing the interests and perspectives of end users in the cloud native ecosystem and ensuring that this ecosystem continues to evolve in a direction that meets the needs and expectations of its users. The TAB also bridges end users and the other governing pillars of the CNCF – the Governing Board (GB) and the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC).
2024 TAB Initiatives
In 2024, the End User TAB kicked off its first year, electing Alolita Sharma as the TAB Chair and Henrik Blixt as the TAB Vice Chair. In the initial meetings, the TAB identified multiple areas to focus on, which include –
- Reference Architecture – Reviewing and approving reference architectures: Ensuring that published reference architectures align with the needs and best practices of the end user community.
- Project Feedback – Providing feedback to CNCF projects: Offering insights on usability, reliability, and performance of CNCF projects from an end user perspective.
- Increasing visibility around end user adoption: Promoting the adoption of CNCF projects and raising awareness of their benefits among end users.
- Identifying gaps and priorities in the ecosystem: Providing input on the state of the ecosystem from an end user perspective, including areas that require further development or attention.
The TAB selected the first three focus areas to be led by TAB working groups.
The TAB Reference Architecture working group is a collaborative effort within the TAB aimed at providing practical guidance and examples for building cloud-native applications and infrastructure. This group plays a crucial role in promoting best practices, fostering interoperability, and accelerating the adoption of cloud-native technologies. Garry Cairns and Sergiu Peteau lead this group.
The TAB End User Feedback working group is focused on gathering feedback from end users on various aspects of CNCF projects, including usability, reliability, performance, and documentation, providing constructive feedback from end users to project maintainers, and tracking feedback resolution. The TAB hopes to achieve increased collaboration between end users and projects, providing more feedback from end users to projects and greater end user satisfaction. Chad Beaudin and Joe Sandoval lead this group.
The TAB Project Health Visibility working group is focused on improving the visibility and transparency of CNCF projects. This group plays a crucial role in helping end users understand the health and status of CNCF projects, making informed decisions about their adoption, and contributing to the overall success of the CNCF ecosystem. This working group aims to achieve stronger and well-balanced project governance, improved end user technology decision making and enhanced community engagement in projects. Mario Constanti and Ricardo Rocha lead this group.
End User Participation
We welcome end users interested in participating in these initiatives to join one of the working groups. Please do not hesitate to contact me or any of us on the End User TAB. You can reach out to me or any of us on the CNCF End User TAB on the CNCF Slack channel at #tab or in person at the upcoming Kubecon NA in Salt Lake City on Nov 12-16, 2024.
Reference Links:
- End User TAB on GitHub
- End User Slack Channel #tab
- Reference Architecture Working Group