Cloud Native Computing Foundation KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 - Virtual, 4 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Keynote: The Beginner’s Guide to the CNCF TOC - Liz Rice, VP Open Source Engineering, Aqua Security

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming events: EnvoyCon Virtual on October 15 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual from November 17-20. Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conferences feature presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Keynote: The Beginner’s Guide to the CNCF TOC - Liz Rice, VP Open Source Engineering, Aqua Security

Who is the Technical Oversight Committee? What do its members do? How do projects get picked for adoption into the CNCF? Let’s shine a light on this group who determine which projects are adopted by the CNCF, set the future direction of the cloud native landscape, and are even responsible for the definition of the term “cloud native." This talk discusses the pros & cons of a project’s participation in the CNCF from the perspective of end users, vendors, contributors, and maintainers. It covers the lifecycle for a CNCF project, including: - why projects want to be in the CNCF - how the project adoption process works - the requirements that the CNCF has on projects at different phases of maturity Attendees will leave this talk with insights into how the technical arm of the CNCF works, why it’s important, what the TOC wants to do next, and how they can get involved.

https://sched.co/ZfCr

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Hi my name's liz rice. I look after open source engineering at aqua security where we specialise in cloud native security and I'm also the chair of the cncf's technical oversight committee.

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Don't worry if you don't know what that is. That's what I'm here to explain today.

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The cncf's mission is to make cloud-native computing ubiquitous. The technical oversight committee or toc is the group that guides technical decisions to serve that mission.

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Before I talk about the kinds of decisions we make, let's introduce the team, I'm lucky enough to work with this cast of talented and delightful people that make up the 11 members of the toc, we're engineers, architects and technologists, with significant expertise in cloud native software, we're elected by the governing board by project maintainers and by end users.

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You might be wondering how we as individuals, get to the point where we're elected to the toc.

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So let me talk a bit about my personal journey here in 2018 I was asked to be program co-chair for kubecon and cloudnativecon, and one of my big tasks was to learn about all the different cncf projects, so I could write a keynote talk on project updates across the foundation.

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I did that research three times that year and it gave me a wide level of knowledge across the foundation's projects. To add to the depth of experience, I have in cloud native security not to mention that I've been doing software engineering for literally decades.

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Someone suggested I should use that knowledge and stand for the toc. Now, I'm sure a lot of you have experience of imposter syndrome and let me tell you my first reaction was that I couldn't possibly know enough to be on the toc.

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Surely, but then I spoke with folks that I trust and thought about all the unique experience I had. My inner software engineer had a debate with my inner imposter and the engineer had the better arguments we can all work on ourselves like that and push ourselves to achieve more than we sometimes think possible.

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So I convinced myself to stand for the toc and it turns out that enough people on the governing board agreed other folks on the trc, have years of experience as project maintainers or were involved in the very early days in kubernetes or other great projects.

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We've also got representatives from end user companies who know what it's like to run cloud native at scale being on the toc, isn't a full-time job by the way, we're all volunteers fitting this in alongside our day-to-day work for our employers and collectively we have a ton of experience and knowledge.

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The toc owns the technical vision for the foundation and one tricky definition it considered two years ago was really fundamental. It's the definition of what we mean by the term cloud native.

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I think it's a measure of the complexity of the space, we're in that it takes three paragraphs and I'll be honest. As an engineer, I sometimes find it frustrating that we can spend so much time defining and refining wording, but the language we use is important if we're going to make decisions about whether a project is or isn't a good fit for cloud native computing.

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We'd better, have a good understanding of what that means.

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There are some really key words in the definition that help us recognize cloud native, scalable, dynamic, resilient, loosely coupled manageable, observable automated.

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If an open source project is all of those things, does that make it a good fit for the foundation.

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Remember that we're interested in making cloud native computing ubiquitous.

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The cncf charter describes supporting high quality high velocity projects so that they can work reliably for our end users as soon as possible, so the toc is assessing for cloud nativeness.

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Should that be called cloud nativity, I'm not sure, and we're also assessing for project quality and velocity.

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We're also interested in how the project manages and runs itself day to day and how decisions in the project are made. This is where governance comes in.

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Foundations like the cncf, create a framework for trust, so that people can come together and build great technology, even if they work for competing organizations.

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The mechanisms that underpin this trust framework are neutral ownership of a project's intellectual property and open governance, so that the project is controlled and managed collaboratively as an end user. You want to know that you can rely on a project to be maintained into the future.

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Mutual governance means that if one company loses interest in providing engineering resources for some reason that doesn't have to jeopardize the whole project also, by insisting on mutual open governance, end users can have confidence that cncf projects won't prioritize or reject features simply to fit in with a single vendor's business strategy.

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As a foundation, we don't insist on any particular model of governance so long as it's neutral and open. That's something we consider within the toc, with the help of the staff and legal team at the linux foundation,.

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So I've talked about some of the qualities we're looking for in a project both from a technical and governance standpoint. How does it work in practice?

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One of the toc's main activities is voting on whether to accept projects into the foundation and at what maturity level back in copenhagen in 2018. I first showed this adoption curve illustrating that sandbox projects are experimental.

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An incubation project comes with the assurance that it's been through a due diligence process aimed to identify any significant technical or governance concerns, and a graduated project is on a really firm footing and ready for mass adoption.

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We get a lot of project applications and that's not a surprise. Since the cncf is an attractive proposition for many open source projects and 84 of our project, maintainers said they would recommend cncf to other projects to handle the sheer number of applications. We've recently massively simplified the process for projects who want to apply for sandbox.

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You fill in a short form and the toc reviews and votes on these sandbox applications every two months, but let's be clear, we're not doing any due diligence at sandbox level. These are early stage projects that we think could have potential and where we want to encourage collaboration within the cncf family.

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Many of these are experiments and they wouldn't be very good experiments if every single one were successful.

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So we have archiving processes to retire projects when there's a consensus that they're no longer making progress getting to incubation is a really big step for a project. At incubation, a project can start benefiting from marketing assistance, as well as all the services the cncf offers.

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This is where we do the bulk of the due diligence, which involves reviewing the project and its documentation, trying it out for ourselves interviewing users for their experiences and looking at the level of activity and interest in the project and assessing the way the project is governed.

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Remember that we're looking for high quality high velocity projects pretty hard to have an objective measure of quality that could apply across dozens of different projects at different stages of maturity. So this is why the toc has a lot of leeway to apply judgment based on our experience.

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We want a high bar so that cncf projects represent the best open source tools that our industry has to offer in practice. What matters is that when people use a project, it works for them.

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So a lot of our assessment comes down to learning about real-world experiences of using a project, the more end-user experience we have, the more data we have for making decisions about which projects are working really well for their users, and so I'm excited about the new technology radar that cheryl described that's giving us another readout on real adoption in the field.

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If you join toc calls, you will sooner or later hear the phrases. No king makers and one size does not fit all as a foundation. We don't believe, there's a single stack that meets everyone's needs. We want to offer choices of interoperable components so that you can pick the pieces that are right for you.

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Cncf projects should be best in class, but there can be different measures of best for different environments or applications.

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So it makes sense to allow for multiple solutions to the same problem, but too many options can create confusion and just because a project solves a problem doesn't necessarily mean it's a particularly cloud-native solution, or that there isn't a better, more efficient, more reliable or easier to use alternative.

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We want to give end users choices, but ideally we only offer choices between great options, so the toc has to be able to say no. We know it's a huge disappointment for a project if it gets rejected and I think giving feedback to projects is something we need to get much better at within the toc.

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Accepting or rejecting a project has real impact. So it's not a decision we can take lightly.

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How do we make sure we have the right information to make these decisions you've heard from priyanka how fast the foundation is growing and with so many projects and so much innovation around us? The toc has a lot of work, so that's where the toc community, and in particular the sigs come in a sig is a special interest group and it consists of people with expertise in a particular area who come together to help, support and scale the tocs activity in that area.

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In practice, that generally means advising the toc about projects in their category producing white papers and other information for end users and advising on and promoting best practices across projects.

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Each sig has a group of co-chairs and tech leads to create some structure and direction to the work that the sigs do. They have their own regular meetings and organize their own work. Reporting progress back to the toc in our monthly meetings.

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Getting involved in a sig is a way to share your talents and experience with the community and, if you're passionate about a particular area of cloud native technology, I highly recommend joining the relevant sig.

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The sigs deliberately offer a path you can follow to get more involved and take on more responsibility in the cncf technical community.

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You'll find information about all the sigs on the cncf's github, along with details on how to join in you'll, also find information about the toc on github and on the toc channel in slack, and if you think, you'd find this work interesting. Why not sign up to the toc mailing list and join our public calls everyone's welcome from all corners of the earth, any gender color race or religion and showing up to a sig or the toc could be your first step towards a really meaningful contribution to the toc community.

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The toc is holding a panel session on thursday, where we're hoping your carmen asks lots of questions or please do find me and my fellow toc members online and say hello, we'd love to meet you.

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I hope you have an amazing time at this virtual kubecon and cloudnativecon I'll see you online.