Cloud Native Computing Foundation KCD Washington DC 2021, 8 Nov 2021

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From YouTube: The CNCF Cloud Native Landscape explained, Jason Morgan & Catherine Paganini

Description

If you've researched cloud native applications and technologies, you've probably come across the CNCF cloud native landscape. Unsurprisingly, the sheer scale of it can be overwhelming. So many categories and so many technologies. How do you make sense of it? As with anything else, if you break it down and analyze it one piece at a time, you'll find it's not that complex and makes a lot of sense. In fact, the map is neatly organized by functionality and, once you understand what each category represents, navigating it becomes a lot easier. During this talk, Jason and Catherine break this mammoth landscape down and provide a high-level overview of its layers, columns, and categories.

A

Matt for that, for that uh wonderful, intro, um so we're starting off on the lightest track as far as as far as technical goes and we'll get it'll get deeper throughout the day, thanks so much for your time. uh Right now we're gonna talk about the cloud native landscape, which is a document you may have seen pictures of in various places, or you may be familiar with it itself.

A

It's changed a little bit in the last month or so, and catherine knows the exact time frame and that's what we're going to talk about today.

B

Okay, so, um as fame already mentioned, like my, my co-presenter today, is jason morgan and he's a technical evangelist at buoyant uh the creator of linkerdy one of the cncf projects, we're both co-chairs of the business value subcommittee and maintainers of the cloud native glossary and the authors of the cncf landscape guide and we're going to talk a little bit more about that today.

A

And then I'm obviously I'm joined by catherine who's, head of marketing has really been the driving force behind the glossary behind the landscape and the conference, and so I'm super grateful to her and really excited to be presenting with her today.

B

Okay, so today we're gonna, look at the landscape first and just um see uh what updates are there I mean you may or may not have seen them. Then we're gonna tell you a little bit how we got there. uh We are going to discuss the landscape architecture, tell you how to use it and then we're going to make like a little trip to the glossary and then uh we'll let you know how you can help if you would like to be involved.

A

Awesome, thank you, uh show the landscape, I'm actually going to get out of slides and hop over to it, but it's changed and let's show how it's changed. So this, if you haven't seen it is the cloud native landscape. There are posters of it. There are. You know, diagrams of that guy from it's always sunny doing his conspiracy thing over it. There's a lot.

A

There's a lot going on here uh and you know when we looked at it, we wanted to make it a little bit more friendly and one thing that's changed is now: if you go to it, there's a guide button on the top right, where you can hop over to what you'd expect an interactive guide which will talk about the various sections and what it means and there's also on each section, there's a little uh info icon that you can click on to get specifically to the part of the landscape guide that talks about that piece.

A

Okay and let's go back to the slides catherine back to you,.

B

Yeah- and so I mean you just- saw this mammoth landscape uh and um have you ever felt uh overwhelmed while looking at it? Well, we certainly did, and so we wanted to understand it better uh and thought the doctors might probably too so we started writing a series for the new stack um and where we broke each layer and calmed down into different categories, um and so we got really really good feedback from different people and at some point we thought like this is actually the type of content that the cncf should own right.

B

So we approached the cncf and started the business value subcommittee and created our first project, which was the cloud native glossary and we're going to talk about that in a little bit. Our second project was this landscape guide that we just saw and basically what we did is we adapted the new stack series into this guide and then because it is like this huge, uh a piece of content. We also added those little icons because we thought that would be a little bit more user friendly.

B

um So you can jump uh right to that section, as jason showed you, so both of them launched during kubecon, so super excited about that um on and side note something that also um launched at cubecon and is also available to you now and we're really excited is the new business value track. um So as of this cfp for europe, now you it's part of the regular cfp. So if you or your clients have achieved real business value uh with cloud native technologies, please submit a talk. These stories are really important.

B

They really help kind of drive adoption, uh because people need to understand how you actually derive value from these technology right, not.

A

B

How cool these technologies are anyways, uh so that's, basically how we got to change the landscape, and now I think, it's time to have a look at the landscape and how it works so jason over to you.

A

Thank you so much and and like catherine said, there we're gonna post a link to the business value slack channel later and yeah really really interested in more and more stories that folks can tell about. You know going from the g-whiz technical thing to the. This is how our business changed for the better by using cloud native tech, so with that uh back to the landscape. So let's talk about this thing and make it a little bit less scary for everybody right so there are.

A

You know that the cloud native landscape itself is kind of like a like a stack or a cake or whatever you want to call it. So there's a bunch going on we're going to talk about what the different, what the different uh layers and columns mean, what what what's in the categories? What's the difference between the boxes? Why are they different sizes all that stuff? So with that? Let's hop right back to the landscape.

A

So what you see here, you know that, like I said, there's a lot there's a lot going on, but we have these big blocks right. So down here are rows, so we have special, which you know, there's not actually a ton to say about that. You know provisioning run time, whatever a bunch of stuff and then within those rows. We've got groupings right.

A

So this is this is a category within within a layer right um and- and we also, if we glide over here to the right uh we've got- we've got two kind of cross, cutting things or columns as you'll see I'm described in our presentation right. So um basically, the things that make up your cloud native stack or your application platform, and then the actual application can be on the left layered up together and the things on the right-hand side are going to be cross-cutting concerns that either help with multiple things or are needed to make.

A

You know multiple layers work together. So that's the that's the basic concept and at any time you can click on. One of these things see see a description of what this section is right. Try we tried to write everything in very plain language.

A

If you have comments you can you can make comments directly on the landscape, repo and raise issues, um but you know for each section: we tell you what it is: the problem that it's made to address, how it, how it addresses that problem and a little bit of a little bit of deeper technical knowledge on the subject. If, in some cases we have an info box and for each one we do buzzwords and graduated product projects or graduate projects.

A

um On top of that we'll see here right, we've got big boxes, small boxes and white and gray boxes right. So a big box is either dark blue, which means it's it's a graduated project, which is not that it's left the cncf, but that the cncf has determined that this open source project meets its highest standard for maturity right and that it's it's absolutely something that that you should feel comfortable.

A

Adopting incubating is a mature project uh that is, that has not yet hit graduated status for whatever reason, and then there are sandbox projects that we can't see from this view, the other. The other thing to look at is for these little boxes. They're, all either white or gray white boxes represent or are meant to represent an open source project and the gray boxes are meant to represent a commercial or closed source offering.

A

So, let's just hop into what's a good one. So this one storage has it all. So, let's just go in here, oh didn't mean to go unlock longhorn um there we go cloud native storage. If I click on the top here, we'll hop in so I can see that we've got. You know some closed source things, some open source things, and we also have a couple that are in light, blue or in this case yeah. Two, no one, that's in light blue, and that means it's a cncf sandbox project.

A

So that's a pretty low barrier to entry to get in to be a sandbox project, and that doesn't mean it's doesn't mean it's not mature. It doesn't mean it's not good. Just means it hasn't hit the cnc cncf criteria for stepping up their ladder, and I think that's it uh catherine back to you to actually talk about what some of these layers mean.

B

Yeah I mean like we, we, like jason, already provided, provided this nice overview, but let's look at each layer individually right.

B

So we basically just said like there's like a really like a um uh there is something behind so like you have like the lowest layer and then you kind of move up your stack right so at the very bottom, the first layer is the provisioning layer, and here you find all the tools that you need to create and harden the foundation of your cloud native apps right so automation and configuration container registry uh security and compliance there. You have the oppa uh project that graduated, I think earlier this year and uh key management.

B

Those are kind of the things that you will find here.

A

Yeah beyond or above that right, so it's kind of layered in terms of how you think of your your platform right. So at the bottom, it's stuff we need to either secure the foundations or actually deploy our environment above that we have our our runtime layer right. That is our cloud native storage. What are we going to do as far as provisioning disks, whatever else that may be the container runtime itself, provided that we're using containers or firecracker, if you're, using very small little vms?

A

So this is where you find container d, cryo firecracker, whatever else, and then cloud native networking, including you know, the pretty commonly adopted cni.

B

Okay and the next layer is the orchestration and management layer. There you'll find scheduling orchestration, and this is where the famous kubernetes project lives. uh You have coordination and service discovery, um remote procedure calls uh grpc, is kind of a big thing. Everyone is talking about it. Service proxy envoy is also very big here. Api gateway and service mesh and service mesh, of course, is very dear to our hearts, because that's where the link rd project, our project lives.

A

Absolutely uh app definition and development so kind of top. You know it's the top thing on the landscape. It's also the top of your stack as you're you're thinking about your environment. So this is everything from you know. How am I going to store and persist data right to you know. Am I going to use a messaging service which is very much an application level concern you know: uh do we want to use helm to deploy our our own applications, or are we using vendor-provided helm charts to deploy things?

A

We also have build packs in here. So, if you haven't looked at cloud-native build packs, this is where you'll you'll find tooling to actually inspect your code. Build your container without you having to write docker files at all uh the operator framework and a ton of other great stuff uh falls under this this category.

A

Last but not least, uh continuous integration delivery now there's a whole continuous delivery foundation, which has much more in the space that you can. You can dig into, but this is where we find the argo project, flagger and flux, so tools for doing progressive delivery. All of our get op stuff. You also see things like jenkins, gitlab and a bunch of other tools end up over here.

B

Okay, so those were all the layers right and now we're moving to the columns and we're going to look first at observability and analysis and just like to what does it actually mean so observability, basically, is the degree it defines like the degree to which a system is. uh You can understand it through its outputs and analysis is when you look at that data and make sense of it right. That's why you're going to find monitoring logging and tracing here and cows?

B

Cows engineering is kind of a little bit interesting here, because it does not really fit in the observability analysis, but it does help. You understand your system better or like keep your um system healthy, and that's why it's kind of uh embedded in this category and because you really kind of need to observe the entire stack like the everything. That's why it's uh it's at the side and not embedded in one of those layers.

A

Yeah awesome now, last but not least, platforms right. So this is everything from you know your kubernetes distributions. That's like open source things or you know more proprietary things like your.

A

You know, vmware, tanzu or openshift, or you know whatever right, uh whatever else in that space, but this is like all the bits bundled together to deploy your kubernetes cluster so that you can kind of get that get that going and get up and running uh past that right in the next next little category, we've got uh the hosted kubernetes right, I used to call them the star ks's right it is. You know your gke eks aks, I forget digitaloceans1.

A

You know sibo cloud right. All those various kubernetes and service providers um live in here and if I didn't mention it, it's not, you know, dig against the product. Just uh just can't remember everything on the at the spur of the moment uh past that we have our installers, so cool stuff, like cube, adm lives here, uh rke lives here. uh K3D and k3s cops right like the tools that you know.

A

If, in the in the before times, a lot of us had to use to like actually get our clusters up and going at first and people still use it, obviously all the time today and last but not least, uh this is where we find paths or container services right specifically you'll find things like heroku and cloud foundry for those that are looking for. You know something that can you know, take your code and run it in the cloud for you without you having to worry about about how that happens, and that's it.

B

Yeah and so that's basically the landscape on a very high level. If you want to learn more check out the guide, there's a lot of content there, um but yeah as promised. We also wanted to tell you a little bit about this other project, that we did the cloud native glossary and you can find it uh on and glossary.cncf.io.

B

You can also navigate to it through the cncf webpage under community and um yeah. So, basically, what we wanted to do is uh to try to explain the most important cognitive terms in simple words right, so our goal is to make it accessible not only to technical people but also to non-technical people.

B

uh But before I talk too much, why don't we have a quick look, jason.

A

Yeah uh and right off this we're gonna talk about our kind of call to action right, but what the glossary site is. Is it's a series of terms? I think, about 48 right at this moment, because I've been slacking on getting the last two done, um but it's it's a bunch of terms that are things we'll use in cloud native that are open sourced that are available for people to edit or you know, complain about right.

A

So at any point you can go in uh click the edit page or report issue to go over to the git repo that powers all of this and and the goal here is to take something like what is an api gateway right and explain it in in as plain language as we possibly can. So, even if you don't start out, you know already indoctrinated in the cloud native space and in cloud native tooling, you can get a sense of what it what it means like what what the word means.

A

You know first simply what it is, what what problem space it's looking to address and then how it helps with that problem. Space right and, of course, your feedback is really valuable.

A

You know, if you like the definitions, you know link to it or you know just say you like it on twitter, whatever right, although I don't imagine people reading the glossary for fun, but regardless link to it. If you find that it's a useful definition in the things you're writing you can link to each individual term.

A

You can also link to the sub sections as needed and at any point, if you don't, if you have a problem with the definition, you can send a pull request or you can just open an issue right there and um and tell us that we need to fix a b or c, of course, fixes with pull requests, get prioritized over over just telling me something doesn't work um and yeah. That's the that's a long story short. So let me go back to presentation.

B

Okay and so yeah we would love to to get involved, uh join the business value subcommittee. um If you know of a resource that would be helpful. uh Let's do it together. We really can bring it to life.

B

um So one of one of the things that jason- and I have learned is that if you have an idea are willing to lead it, of course, if it makes sense, uh the cncf is super supportive, and you can I mean, look at us we're not now on the cn and the cncf uh landscape, I mean it's, it's really exciting and there's a lot you can do so to get involved to get started.

B

um Join our slack channel ask to be invited to our monthly meetings, um and but if you just wanna, if you thought like the glossary or something like more smaller, would be a fine yeah have a look there. Do you see something is missing or needs to be updated, so miss sumida pr, as jason said, there are really so many ways you can contribute to the community without necessarily having to contribute code. um So, yes, we would love for you to be part of it and yeah. Thanks for listening today,.

A

Yeah and just one more before that, we're also in the process of looking to add the glossary into more languages. So if you are a native speaker of a language other than english, also love to start getting terms in other languages right because, obviously you know, technology isn't or shouldn't be limited to folks speaking, a particular language. We'd love to get it in your particular um in your particular area of expertise.

A

So sorry for all the asks here, but you can do a lot if you're willing to to get involved, and we read love we'd love to help other people also, you know, share things and impact the environment.

A

I want to give a quick preview of what's next um following this call right. If people don't have questions we can we can take a little break, but we've also got growing up in a cloud native org right which, which seems fantastic: uh local development techniques with kubernetes and you've seen the rest of the schedule.

A

So I'm not gonna, not gonna hammer through it right, but there's a lot of great talks coming up and you can see when they'll be for the rest today and of course, you can also see that on the community site as well, all right fame go ahead. Sorry, I.

C

Was going to ask there's a question from peter? Is there a way to compare a large box to a smaller one by feature to understand the benefits.

A

Yeah great great question, peter really appreciate, so let me let me pop in long story. Short is no absolutely like. So none of these, like these things, are actually value. Judgments right or they may be, but you know they they. The the size of your box in in the landscape guide, is a hundred percent related to what stage you are in the cncf uh adoption cycle right, so that the adoption cycle is three tiers right.

A

You have sandbox, which is you know, fairly straightforward to get into you have incubating, which is there's some amount of technical validation having been done by the cncf right. That's not saying just because you're a sandbox product doesn't mean you're, not mature, but it means the cncf hasn't rated you that way. Right, um then incubating so that the first way to get a big box is to be incubating right. That means you've gone through the cncf process from sandbox through to incubating, and then the last box, which isn't any bigger. It's just darker right.

A

So we can see it here under application and and um application definition and image build right. Build packs are incubating because that's how that's, how far they've been validated through the cncf and how ms graduated right now they're. It's not like. It's not apples to apples when you compare these things because they're totally different projects that do totally different things.

A

um I hope that answered your question. Peter.

C

Awesome, thank you and then there musa is asking about the cncf.

C

um We just need to share that. I think.

A

Okay, yeah so we'll we'll post the link in the chat or catherine. If you don't mind, could you post a link to to join the slack for the cncf and then once you're in there? It's the? uh What is it the business values I'll I'll, post, I'll post post the hashtag in the chat as well?

A

Just so we just so you have it right, but we'd love to we'd love to hear from you can't can't wait, there's also a glossary maintainer or a glossary um slack that may only be for maintainers, but if you're interested in becoming a maintainer, we're happy to have been involved in that as well.

C

And then one more question before I let you go so can you repeat what is the difference between the gray and the white boxes.

A

Yeah, uh so it is, it is, are you an open source project or are you something that is closed, source or commercial.

C

Okay right because I saw like aks had a white box and aws had a great.

A

Well, so they they have.

C

That's actually.

A

A really funny one! So what there is it's it's great, because there's aks the azure azure kubernetes service as gray and there's microsoft's aks engine for azure stack, which is a little thing, the open source. So, like you know, there's there's a lot of a lot of things going on. I.

C

Think aws is also coming up um with something like that. It's their own, like uh open source version of the engine that you can run on-premise with.

A

Yeah, if you look in here, I don't know if it's in there but you'll see vmware down at the bottom for the vmware tanzu right, but they also have a tonzu, oh yeah, okay, so it's already in there now. So you.

C

Can see there's.

A

The community edition and then there's their you know their paid version all right.

C

Thank you so much.