The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Technical Oversight Committee

Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, containerd ... The list of projects managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is quite extensive, and growing by the month it seems. But how does the CNCF manage its expansive collection of open source cloud native software projects? How does it decide when a project move from incubation to graduation. Many of these decisions are made by the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). We wanted to find out more about how the TOC operates.

Jun 25th, 2019 3:00pm by Joab Jackson

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This podcast has been sponsored by Kubecon + CloudNativeCon.

Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, containerd … The list of projects managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is quite extensive, and growing by the month it seems. But how does the CNCF manage its expansive collection of open source cloud native software projects? How does it decide when a project move from incubation to graduation. Many of these decisions are made by the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). We wanted to find out more about how the TOC operates.

To this end, we invited the TOC chair (and Aqua Security Technology Evangelist) Liz Rice to appear on our newest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, to discuss all things TOC. We invited Eduardo Silva, who is the core developer for one of the CNCF projects, Fluentd, a multiplatform open-source log aggregator. Silva, who is also a principal engineer for ARM, discussed his experience in agreeing to work with the CNCF. Last month, FluentD had “graduated,” within the CNCF, moving up from “incubation status.”

“The CNCF and TOC have that wide vision about the market, and the coming trends and challenges. That is a real value, because you know you can align your projects for the challenges that are coming,” Silva said.

This interview was recorded at Kubecon + CloudNativeCon EU last month in Barcelona. Kubecon + CloudNativeCon is an event overseen by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The New Stack managing editor Joab Jackson hosted this episode.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Technical Oversight Committee

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In this Edition:

3:03: What is it that they [The TOC] do for each of the projects?
6:14: What does it mean for Fluentd to move from incubation status to full-fledged status?
13:33: How do you populate each project’s TOC?
18:52: Are you finding that projects increasingly fit in the CNCF bucket, or that they should go elsewhere? What’s the TOC’s thought on that?
21:57: You’re seeing a lot of interest in stream processing, then?
26:02: How would you prevent the same thing from happening with CNCF projects?

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack.

Joab Jackson is a senior editor for The New Stack, covering cloud native computing and system operations. He has reported on IT infrastructure and development for over 25 years, including stints at IDG and Government Computer News. Before that, he...