End User
Journey Report

With more than 5,000 contributions to date, Adobe’s team continues to be energized by the promise of open source at scale and the role of the CNCF. The company is widely recognized for its technical breakthroughs and thought leadership around internal developer platforms, working closely with the CNCF Argo project and driving its own version internally. 

Adobe takes the idea of open source mentorship seriously, and team members are regularly speaking, advising, and helping to troubleshoot other organizations’ efforts to scale internal developer platforms, Kubernetes implementations, and more. Adobe currently contributes to 46 CNCF projects and readily acknowledges how much value they’ve brought to the organization’s mission of improving the developer experience. Adobe is on the CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board and is a regular presenter at CNCF conferences.

Although Adobe “officially” joined CNCF two years ago, the company embraced the idea of cloud native by 2015, and team members began contributing to various CNCF projects at that time, starting with etcd.

“We joined because we wanted to contribute to the organization since we use so many of the projects,” explained Joseph Sandoval, principal product manager of platform engineering. Adobe’s first CNCF event was Kubecon 2018 in Seattle, and that is also where team members presented for the first time.

All told, Adobe contributes to 46 different CNCF projects, including Argo, Cillium, Envoy, Fluentd, Helm, K8s, OTel, and Prometheus. The benefits to Adobe have been clear, from cross-industry collaboration to more engaged developers and a burgeoning role as a thought leader in the internal developer platform space. “We’ve taken quite a good chunk of CNCF portfolios, and then we’ll build it and productize it,” said Srinivas Peri, Director of Engineering, Developer Experience at Adobe. “And then we give it to the rest of Adobe to improve the developer experience.”

At Adobe, enthusiasm for CNCF is genuine. Here are some of the concrete benefits they’ve seen:

No organization is successful operating in a vacuum and Adobe is very aware of the need to both give and receive feedback.

Because it’s open source, this is a way that we could pay this forward for other end users but then I also get the net benefits of meeting a lot of people in the community. The dialogue really helps us to improve the products that we then bring back to our company

Joseph Sandoval

Principal Product Manager,


Platform Engineering

But the cyclical relationship very much goes both ways. The company gets concrete improvements “out of being active and having these dialogues with people who are contributors, maintainers, and other end users,” explained Sandoval.

Lead cloud engineer Mike Tougeron described the CNCF, and specifically the conferences, as a goldmine of conversations, best practices and recommendations, not to mention very honest feedback. In fact, this thoughtful and nuanced input is exactly why he attends CNCF conferences.

The different projects that are out there and the way in which you’re welcomed in… people accept your contributions and your questions and conversations. It is very engaged, very high touch, very positive and very constructive. And it’s a two-way street.

Mike Tougeron

Lead Cloud Engineer

But the power of 360 feedback goes beyond just talk at Adobe. As a member of the Cloud Native Operational Excellence Initiative, Adobe adopted the recommendations for a robust and operationally excellent internal developer platform (IDP) and has run with it. “We contributed by actually using it a lot and using it heavily, so we’ve been able to discover if there are missing features or bugs and report that back,” Srinivas Peri, Director of Engineering, Developer Experience at Adobe, said.

Participation has resulted in some bonuses that stretch beyond the platform and the technology.

There’s been a lot of interest in this space (IDPs) and a lot of companies with similar mindsets about this have started reaching out to us. Organizations want to know exactly what we’re doing, or not doing, and what technologies work best for us.

Vikram Sethi

Principal Scientist,

Developer Platforms

In the end that’s translated to some serious “street cred” for Adobe, Sandoval offered. “We do get a lot more inquiries about how we’re using these things,” he said. “A lot of our large cloud providers who are partners reach out to us for feedback on projects or if they should incorporate things we’ve done into their projects as well. We’re all really trying to help uplevel each other as we adopt some of these projects and I definitely think our visibility has risen.”

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Recognized cloud native at scale leadership

Adobe’s participation in CNCF has also brought another recognition: the company is now one of the largest cloud native players pushing these initiatives at scale. “Very few companies are in this space,” Sethi said.

With the scale we handle – our amount of clusters, traffic and our CI/CD solution – and our types of use cases, companies are particularly interested in reaching out to us because in their opinion we’re ahead of the curve. As far as the industry is concerned we are trying to disrupt and to sort of lead the way in terms of how people should think about IDPs. From a cloud leadership perspective, our situation is pretty unique.

Vikram Sethi

Principal Scientist,

Developer Platforms

Adobe’s unique situation gives the team an ideal opportunity to participate in CNCF’s initiatives and directions. Sandoval said that the Karpenter project, a Kubernetes node lifecycle manager recently donated to CNCF and driven by AWS, is an excellent example of how this can work. Adobe was eager to sponsor Karpenter to ensure it became part of CNCF directly and brought Microsoft into the project. “We played a very influential role in that project,” Sandoval said, adding that Adobe played a crucial role in helping Intuit craft the Argo project.

Whether the Adobe team is contributing to future CNCF projects, speaking at conferences like Autodesk Data, or hosting their own IDP mini-summit during ArgoCon in 2022, they’re sending a clear signal to current and future tech hires: this is a fast-moving, flexible, and creative cloud native enterprise that takes open source very seriously. Hiring-wise, Peri thinks Adobe’s thought leadership in the open source space makes the company a beautiful workplace. Also, it doesn’t hurt that the Adobe culture is open to even potentially complex changes.

“We had a lot of in-house CI/CD tools that were working and really everything was working right,” Peri said. “But we took on a challenge and disrupted it all and now we’re showcasing what we did and showing others how to do it. I think we have a good story to tell here.” And when it comes to retention, team enthusiasm for the CNCF projects (and Sandoval’s recent talk) has created a buzz of excitement.

I think our brand and what we are doing, at least in the last two years, gives a lot of energy to many of our engineers.

Srinivas Peri

Director of Engineering, Developer Experience

Adobe