Keynote: The Cloud Native Feedback Loop... Karena Angell, Katie Gamanji, Chad Beaudin & Ahmed Bebars

This talk emphasizes the collaborative nature of cloud native technology, presenting it as a movement rather than just a collection of tools. The speaker explains the importance of the feedback loop between end users, technical oversight committees, and project maintainers as essential for innovation. They introduce several participants, including Chad, an enterprise architect from Cycle AI, who is exploring the adoption of the Carbon Cutter project. Discussions center around project maturity levels within the CNCF, including sandbox, incubated, and graduated projects, and highlight the roles of the TOC and TAB in ensuring projects are production-ready. The speaker illustrates how user feedback drives project improvements, using real-world examples to demonstrate how contributions from end users can influence project development and evolution within the CNCF ecosystem.

Good morning everyone. So, cloud native isn't just technology. It's a movement and everyone in this room whether you contribute code, you review it, or you make standards or on the on the governing board, you are the engine behind it. But here is what what's nobody talks about. The magic doesn't happen in isolation. It's a feedback loop that's created when an end user real pain problem becomes the

next project breakthrough. It's a whole feedback cycle. And we are here today to walk you through this loop between the end user, the tab, the TOC, and the project maintainer. So, today because we are in Amsterdam and Chad going to be our end user, but he is one of the people as other people brought like Ricardo, brought a glider, Glenn brought a drone, we brought a bike.

Let me introduce our cast. Chad, our end user. He's an enterprise architect for Cycle AI. They build self-driving bikes. Yes, I know, the future is wild. Katie, TOC member. She's the one making sure projects are healthy, mature, and production ready. Myself, tab member. We are combining your feedback and what the ecosystem delivers. Karina, project maintainer for Carbon Cutter, a project that is responsible for reducing the resource

consumption for cloud native. So, we have four stops, four rows, >> [clears throat] >> one bike ride. Let's go. My company Cycle AI is revolutionizing the cycling the urban industry urban transportation industry. Our AI models are incredible. Agenda AI is changing the way our software developers do their jobs, but our AI spend is through the roof and I've got to figure out a way to get this

under control. I remember during the keynote from Chris Aniszczyk a couple days ago, he talked about the reference architectures from the tabs. This is a great place for me to start so I don't have to start from ground zero. It's proven technologies and sustainable in a way that will my company get a head up. So, looking through this this sample reference architecture, I see this there's this

product Carbon Cutter. I think this project will be great for what my company needs. But I noticed it's an incubated state. I'm not real sure what incubated state means. I don't know what the implications for me running incubated projects in production. So, I'm going to head over, talk to some of my friends over at the TOC and the tab. >> [applause] >> Hey Katie, my name's Chad

Bowden. My company Cycle AI is looking at using a project from the CNCF called Carbon don't really know all that that entails. I was wondering if you could help fill me in. Absolutely. This is where the TOC or the technical oversight committee steps in. The TOC provides a technical vision and for the wider CNCF landscape and we help projects to go for different maturity levels. Currently within

CNCF, we have more than 230 projects which are dispersed across three different levels of maturity. We have sandbox, incubated, and graduated projects. Sandbox projects are niche greenfield ideas. They provide a solution for a small but defined problem space. Next, we have incubated projects and here we already see more adoption in production, but more importantly we see contributions from different organizations because we want to ensure the vendor

neutrality in the project development. And finally, we have the graduated projects and these projects are here to stay. They should provide a solution within an established area within the ecosystem. We also refer to these projects as the ones who cross the chasm. So, pretty much move from early majority to early adopters. However, there is another state a project can reach and that's archival and I don't think

we talk sufficiently about archival. Sometimes it is natural for some of the projects not to reach that momentum in contributorship or adopt a ship and I think it's very important for the projects to take the lessons learned and redirect their energies towards existing initiatives within the ecosystem or by creating something new and open sourcing that. Now, when we are evaluating the maturity of a project, we are

conducting a due diligence process. And as part of this process, we are looking into very specific areas within the project such as governance, making sure it is defined but also applied. We look into the contributor strategy, making sure that there is a way to provide feedback within a project, but more importantly for someone to become a maintainer of the project. Security, very important. Here we look into

the fact that there is a way to report vulnerabilities, but also for the projects to address that in a timely manner. And engineering principles. And in this case, we look into the scope of the project from a functionality perspective and making sure there is a road map with milestones attached. Now, these are just few of the criteria that we use. If you are curious about the full

due diligence process, I invite you to check the TOC repository, but also if you have a project, you'd be able to use some of those criteria to understand some of the gaps you can cover if you'd like to come within CNCF. Now, another point of reference that we use is LFX insights. LFX insights is a portal that contains information about the project but is easy to navigate

and reference. In this particular case, Carbon Cutter is doing very well. However, there are still some areas of improvement when it comes to organizational and contributor dependency. In this case, they can reach out to the TOC and we can help. We would evaluate the project and in this scenario, we might suggest a more proactive contributor strategy which means scouting for maintainers and actually helping them become maintainers.

And we might suggest creating a steering committee. Now, this is usually formed by end users and it's another way to provide feedback into the project Now, so far when we look into the due diligence, we look into the technicality of the project about functionalities, scope, governance, contributor community, and so forth. However, this is only one side of the story. The second side of the story is told

by our end users because they use these tools in production at scale. They have the valuable feedback about this. But more about our end user interviews and how they help our due diligence, I'm going to refer to our tab member Ahmed. Thank you, Katie. And exactly, this is where the tab fits in. We are the connector between the projects that Katie described and end user like you,

Chad, where we try to collect feedback because project health is not just a dashboard. It's actually a real problems that you have seen in production. And we do that in a multiple ways. First, we also use LFX insights, but we try to collect who who are adopting these products, what are the issues that they are facing. Another thing that you mentioned earlier, the reference architecture. These are

the battle-tested blueprints that other end user have built for their organization to solve their needs. And one of my favorites is the adopters interview. These are the real candid unvarnished conversation on like what exactly happened in production. We collect all of that feedback and send it back to the TOC governing table. So, when a maturity decision is being made, it's grounded with all of that feedback. Excellent,

thank you. This is great information from both of you, TOC and the tab. I appreciate all the hard work you've done. I have some other questions. I'm going to go talk to the maintainer of the project. See you. See Hey Karina, how you doing? Oh, hey Chad. >> I'm Chad Bowden. I'm from the company I'm looking at using your project Carbon Cutter for our company. There's a

couple things that we're missing from it that I wanted to talk with you about. Got some great information from the TOC and the tab. Well, first of all, it's great to put a face to your GitHub handle. We've had so many conversations on that issue that you brought forward. We this is really a gap and our project's observability that we're excited that you brought. So, we also

noticed that a number of end users and adopters were commenting on the issue. We're trying to figure out where to put it in our backlog and we noticed that you brought forward a solution. So, I was just looking at your pull request and let's bring that up now. So, you see that you'll see that >> [laughter] >> I went ahead and I approved it. So, after a

thorough review, we're looking at making sure there weren't any breaking changes. So, you did mention that you had questions about the release process. We met with the TOC and we got some great advice, great feedback on how to improve our whole release process. So, what we're going to do is we're going to put this feature into alpha and you can go ahead and use it in your

test environment and we have a series of test suites that you can go ahead and download and use and it'd be great if you could bring forward some more test cases so that other end users can test those out too and maybe they have a similar use case. It'd be great to come back if you have any bug fixes and we're going to go ahead and merge

that now. Also, when we want to put this into GA, if you can come back and give us more feedback, but we're going to go ahead and put that on our road map for the next major release. Do you have any questions now? Uh no, that sounds great. I'm looking forward to it. And if you guys end up going through the graduated process, definitely have them reach

out to us as end users. Would love to be part of those adopter interviews. Fantastic. Thanks. Wanted to mention that if your team also wants to um we need to make sure that we update our documentation. So that it, you know, Yes. So that everybody can implement this new feature. And then we'll make sure that it's also in the release notes, but that's an easy way to

get involved. And if your team wants to come join us some more, we'd love to have you. >> All right, thank you. Yeah, thanks. Hey I'm in. How you doing? Hey Chad, good to see you again. Yes, been a couple months since we talked last. Um we've been using the project now for a number of months in production. It's really helped us out. The reference architectures from

the tabs have been invaluable for our company's success. Uh it would have taken us a lot longer to get started without that. As part of that, um we've developed our own reference architecture now that we've had some proven capabilities there. I'd like to feed those back to the tab. Not real sure how to do that. I was wondering if you could step me through what I need

to do. Love that. So this is where we close the loop and our process is really simple. So all you have to do, since you already done all of that work for like ensuring the project working for you in production, all you have to do is go to our tab repo on GitHub, making sure that like you fill the basic information. All we need is your organization

name, like the team, like the project that you used in your architecture. And from there, once you submit that issue, like we will connect back. And that's where like we going to share with all of the end users what have you done. So that's good of you to try to share back to the community and we encourage everyone to do that. So looking forward to connect with

you when you submit your issue and you have your reference architecture ready to be published. All right, thank So this is our reference architecture. We see that it's gone live. I appreciate all the help from the tab, the TOC, and the project maintainers. Uh it's been a wonderful experience for me. Now, this is how we are closing the loop. We started with an end user who is

curious about the project and how they interacted with different bodies within CNCF. With the tab, TOC, and the project He didn't only adopt the project, but he contributed to the project and the wider community by creating a reference Now, as a reminder, the TOCs are here to help projects traverse different However, we do this assessment during particular milestones when we do sandbox incubation and graduation evaluation. However,

if you notice a project who has stale contributions or divergence from the governance, I encourage you to open a health issue. The TOC will evaluate that, but more importantly, will provide a path forward. The end goal here is to make sure that projects have a sustainable evolution within the CNCF landscape. And project maintainers listen and integrate real world feedback. The tab represents you, the end user community,

your workloads, your architecture. So we hope that from today's keynote that you come back and don't just consume cloud native and contribute to it and close the loop. Yes, and as as as end users, uh it's imperative that we provide that feedback both through feature requests and code to the projects. Thank you very much. See you around.