Cloud Native Theater | CNCF Members: Leaving Your Ma... David Palilonis, Jake Pineda & Danielle Cook

This talk discusses the importance and benefits of membership in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), presented by David and his colleagues, including insights from Danielle Cook and Jake. The CNCF, part of the Linux Foundation, supports key projects like Kubernetes and Argo CD, facilitating collaboration among its approximately 750 members. The discussion highlights the value of member organizations in shaping project directions, funding essential technical infrastructure, and promoting open source contributions. The speaker explains how joining the CNCF allows companies to innovate collectively, reduce redundant efforts, and access resources that lead to tangible improvements like reduced time to market and enhanced operational efficiency. Danielle shares her experience in translating CNCF membership into measurable business outcomes through community engagement and effective communication with stakeholders.

Okay, thank you for your Thanks for coming. Thanks for your patience as we got the tech stuff figured out. Um We're here. My name is David. I work for the CNCF. I I lead the membership development and membership success team, um helping to bring in new members and maintain members. Um today with me is Danielle Cook, one of our CNCF ambassadors, who also be uh talking through

a little bit about like a voice of the customer, voice of the member. My colleague Jake as well talk and really we're going to talk about today is why companies join the CNCF, what they get out of it, what what that looks like, and then kind of talk about a little bit about those benefits. So, I'll get started. Our members enable our velocity. The CNCF is a

part of the Linux Foundation, which is a foundation of foundations. They have multiple foundations underneath it. CNCF was started about 10 years ago to really host Kubernetes, host Argo CD, host other projects. In those past 10 years, we've had hundreds of thousands contributors, millions of code commits, millions of pull requests, be able to help give the velocity of the CNCF. The stakes are higher now than ever

before. We had the recently we launched our cloud native survey that talks about the infrastructure of AI's future. Not surprisingly, cloud native is near universal adoption. Kubernetes now the default in production environments. It's become and now it's also become the platform for generative AI as we saw in the keynote the other day. But there is a maturity gap between experimental and daily production. What is a CNCF?

You're all here, you have an idea, but we are the nonprofit home for all these about 280 750 members and growing. These are all of our platinum members and gold There are wall of silver members. So, what does all that mean? What do these different parts of the CNCF do? So, we first off have our governing board. The governing board is made up of our platinum members

and reps from gold and silver. They decide the strategic direction. They decide how the money is spent for the foundation. We have our technical oversight committee, which is made up of technical architects that preside decide which projects are accepted in advance, which projects are eventually sunsetted. They are supported by all these initiatives, subprojects, and tags. You'll see a lot of them in the in the project pavilion.

Then we have our end user group. So, we have an end user technical advisory board made up of end users elected by our end user members. This is provides the voice of the end users back to both the projects and to the vendors, so they understand what members are interested in what they're using. Our participation spectrum, we go from consumer to participant to leader. This is how

we kind of see the world for both individually and also companies. So, every company, definitely every company that's represented here and most companies in the world are consumer of open source. Many of them are consumer of cloud native projects. How do they then move up the ladder? So, individually, their customer their employees can be participants in the projects that they support be utilizing all of those projects.

Then they how do they become more of a leader? That's where they start to become more involved in the foundation as a member, as individual participants can be more involved in the foundation. What changes when a member when a company joins the foundation? The member organizations themselves, what they gain access to conformance programs, influence the directions of key infrastructure initiatives, shared R&D investment to reduce work, driving

cooperation in the growth of the security AI ML and edge computing, and work contributions highlighted in official channels offering visibility behind beyond GitHub. What the developers what you all gain? Upstream contributions receive organizational backing, eligibility for governance roles on the various boards and the tags. Case studies and talks carry more weight cuz you're now a member of the foundation, access to private member channels, and certifications can

connect to a recognized member ecosystem. The bottom line, dev shape projects and memberships help shape the ecosystem. I'm going to turn over to my colleague Jake now for to continue on the presentation. Hello everyone. So I just wanted to talk a little bit more about how members are leaders in that that aspect, right? So what you're seeing there is the feedback loop, right? And it's really the

whole point of this talk. So for example, governing board seats and tag participation means that the influence of a projects already running in production, the actual decision making are things that are reflect real world needs. So members fund the security audits, CICD, release engineering, all the infrastructure necessary, but not one company can sustain this alone. So if you're using a piece of technology that has wide adoption,

right? It makes sense to have multiple organizations, you know, from all walks of industries come in and collaborate. The CNCF acts as a body to unify them, to allocate funds, allocate resources, and engineering talent. So some examples like when IBM publishes native results or data galaxy shares a data migration, that's a reference architecture. So if you are one of the companies who has a reference architecture published

through us, your company gets recognized and the ecosystem gets adoption stories that helps the next company build on what you created. So it's part of that self-sustaining feedback loop. Furthermore, you know, instead of five companies, you know, rebuilding the same stack, uh members pool together talent for like certain projects, let's say open telemetry, right? Uh and they compete where it actually matters. So, less duplication, less repetition,

uh less ways of of implementing this. Uh that way it makes it easy for the consumer to consume the product uh in all different flavors, um which has that aspect the effect too that uh your your product gets uh more adoption, right? Um so, shared investment does generate more influence. Uh more people in a room who understand the problems, the loop keeps compounding, and the difference being

that, you know, this feedback loop is not a sponsorship. Membership is completely different. Uh sponsorship is a one-time transaction, right? Can be done multiple times, but the membership is meant to be a uh system that builds on itself, right? Our members are representatives and extensions of the CNCF. Their funding helps with that, um and more than anything, their participation uh helps with that. So, in short, membership

is a compounding system, while sponsorship is a single transaction, um and membership ensures that there is sustainable evolution and the growth of the the technologies that we use every day. So, just want to highlight some examples of members of ours innovating. So, we have uh direct involvement in the governance enables these companies to have the agility and innovate, rather than to just simply react to changes, right?

Uh examples are like IBM using native eventing in Watson X to cut ML training time by 60% and eliminate 40,000 lines of code. So, that's efficiency in action, and that's having a direct say in the the technology. Uh same thing with Data Galaxy using Dapr to modernize legacy system into a modular architecture. Um this helped improve the developer productivity, resiliency, and unblocks AI analytics features that, you

know, an older type of architecture would not have enabled them to do. So, in short, this exam you know, I do encourage you to go to the CNCF case studies look it up, search it They have We have dozens of these case studies from some of the biggest companies from all types of industries financial, health innovating, you know, being directly involved in our projects and then having

tangible business results. So, in short, governance does enable faster time to market and ensures that your organization's goals are met. So, once again, you know, when you get a chance take a look at CNCF case studies. This is a look at some of our members, you know, and the things they've done within hours when our ecosystem. You know, Spotify they replaced homegrown orchestration with Kubernetes. They cut

creation time to seconds and improved CPU usage by two to three times. Spotify Spotify as you might all know is also responsible for backstage. They're responsible for donating backstage to the CNCF and they have been very instrumental in its growth. So, if you see backstage content wouldn't have been possible without a member like Spotify who took direct governance in the program and in the foundation. So, Michelin

same thing they rebuilt their Kubernetes platform. They've achieved a reduction in platform cost, you know, faster upgrades and another thing that's notable is that Michelin is also an a very active end user to this day. In London last year they actually won the end user award. So, that's something that's notable they have direct involvement in the projects that they depend on. Grafana Labs, you know, using Jaeger

tracing to diagnose latency. They improved query performance by up to 10% and Grafana has also held seats on a governing board and they have been very instrumental in the standardization of other technologies as far as metrics and observability as well. So, this is some information that we have from the most recent report from the Linux Foundation research on ROI of open source software contributions. On average it's

a 600 and 670,000 that's spent on workarounds for siloed open source. Now, when I say siloed open source, I mean, you know, you take a fork, you uh maintain it yourself, um and you don't do any contributions back upstream. So, therefore, it's yours. Uh that is very volatile because it's dependent on certain people. If there's a turnaround in the staff, then, you know, that's that project that

perhaps has a ton of dependencies internally uh is at risk of of uh being discontinued because perhaps certain staff members were in charge of it. Uh contributing upstream prevents that. You know, giving those giving those uh lines of code upstream to make sure they're reflected in the main project is something that could be uh very beneficial. Can help on in a business perspective. Uh 258,000 is released

to maintain these private forks on average, which is a pretty staggering number, right? That's a quarter over a quarter of a million. Um the information come from this is a survey from members of the Cloud Native Community, members and non-members alike from all sizes and regions. We did Latin America, India, Europe, uh North America, uh Africa. Um one of the best takeaways is that, you know, to

treat member membership as an extension of your product and R&D teams. Um this is the best way we've seen that our members take advantage of this and have really propelled themselves and make sure they stay innovating. So, I'll make sure to link survey um and I'll update the slides so when I upload them on Sched for everyone. but just some more information regarding that with the report

is that membership essentially is the highest efficiency way to contribute to open source. Um mem membership offers 4.8 uh benefit to cost ratio, so you get 4.8 uh percent more out of it than than the expense itself. It results in 24% increase in overall open source contribution rates, which once again, that does have tangible business value. Membership provides the open source, as I said before. Um number

one, it's not just a single transaction. It is you uh giving a commitment to the technology itself, to the governance, to to sustainability, and it delivers the same ROI as direct usage, but it has less internal overhead. So, what that means is that uh you're not essentially burning having all the cost yourself. You are essentially pooling the resource and the the maintenance of this project with uh

all 700 of our members and not just yourself. in short, what does an ideal member look like for us? So, members fix in a project rather than forking internally. So, they avoid the work nearly work around costs. Uh you know, IBM and Red Hat contribute to the same Kubernetes code base, but essentially they and the reason why they do so even though they compete is the that

670k uh work around, Same thing with case studies, postmortems, you know, that type of uh content is necessary for the community. That's what a a good member does. Uh shares their experiences, their expertise, their wins, their losses, um and then helps compound ecosystem knowledge, uh and that's how IBM's native story end up helping the next data galaxy, for example, right? Uh and the engineers get protected time,

uh not just permission to maintain, right? To be part of the tags, to be a part of the training and governing board roles. So, these are also things that have direct uh impact in the projects in a wider ecosystem to even competitors, which is a bit a bit crazy to say, but you know, you help your competitors a bit, but uh rising tide lifts all boats, right?

So, also through events, volunteering, support, organization and and slack, SIGs, and code review, one thing I want to say about volunteering and organization is that essentially you are helping create the next generation of cloud native uh architects. You know, I've seen people here from 3 years ago who were just juniors, and now they are seniors at uh at companies here present. Um and that wouldn't have been

possible without the continual mentoring and and organizing of the la- cloud native local groups. Um and also members who expand the road map, they don't just consume it. You know, sandbox submissions, you know, start with the members and saying that we built this, others need it, so we are going to share it. Please come help us with this. And that is the type of member that we

we look for. Although 4.8, you know, ROI on foundation membership exists because adopters otherwise would have to burn it burden this all by themselves. But membership is there to ensure that your investment grows and everyone else benefits from it as a result. So, I'm going to turn this over to Danielle, who's going to give us some insight. All right. I'm Danielle Cook. Um, I'm going to give

you a bit of background of who I am and why should you care. Um, so I run a virtual event called Cube Crash that I do twice a year that looks at kind of everything open source. I've been a member of the CNCF at various companies from silver to gold membership from kind of 20 16 and onwards. Wrote a book, uh, one of the children's books in

the series. Um, so definitely actively involved in the community, but not necessarily contributing code, but more parting, um, being part of working groups, and contributing content to the CNCF. So, I what I wanted to do is give you a bit of a glimpse into how I was able to then demonstrate membership value to the C-levels at my organizations that I worked at. So, um, okay, starting off.

CNCF is amazing for awareness. And this is great for either your personal brand, but also for, you know, the organizations that you work from. So, the things that you can get involved with beyond, you know, contributing code, which is super super important. Um, you know, getting involved with the CNCF webinars, speaking opportunities like this, but also contributing to the blog content. So, many of you might be

contributing code and want to write about that experience and like how can it help you? So, this is an example of one post that I put up at company I was working for and it is still like when I look back at the tracking that the CNCF provides, it's still one of the top top 12 blogs that have shown up in the last few years. So, it's

like okay, great. Awareness driving around an open source project of this company I worked at was promoting. So, like how can I then translate that into metrics? And I think the next slide is the one. So, I will show you that in a moment. Other areas where I was able to kind of demonstrate impact was that kind of consistent engagement in the community, events, contacts, but then

the developer interaction that we would get from it and using the performance of content shares and views, taking the webinars that we were promoting around projects and code contributions and you know, our open source projects and being able to say this is how many people are viewing it, learning from it and having again those metrics. And then tying all of that back to how I am delivering

leads or getting traffic to my website. So, looking at that a little bit more. So, the bottom is a graph that shows kind of open source downloads. And so, we were kind of doing these based on helm charts, but we were able to say like if I put a piece of content on the CNCF website that was talking about my open source project, I could then track

how many referrals were coming to my website, the percentage of referrals from the CNCF to my website. I could then look at of those, how many were actually becoming contacts in my database. And then from there, like how many deals actually entered a pipeline. And so, like I put some metrics and some numbers there to kind of give you an illustration of that's what I was able

to do. So, I was able to tie back the contributions we were doing for the CNCF into something that was a tangible result in pipeline and revenue to the organization, in downloads to our open source projects. So, I think as you're thinking about open source contributions, again, for your brand, your personal brand, and what you can be doing, but also for your company, being able to tie

it to metrics that matter to the business really helps when you come to the end of the year and it's time for renewal and the business goes, "Why should we do this?" Um so, yeah. Those are my examples. Thank you, Danielle. So, yeah, um I just want to encourage you to get start, you know, take a look at what we have, right? Uh join the CNCF slack,

you know, engage with the community, uh find out what you can be involved with, what projects would be uh beneficial to you and to your organization. Okay. First come, first serve. Yeah. Sorry. So, anyways, uh visit the the contributor code and the contributor site. If you don't know where to start with uh project uh contributions, a contributor has a list of open wrecks for projects, you know,

a lot of it's for documentation, a lot of it's for code review. So, please take a look there, get involved if you're looking for something fast and no commitment, just to really uh get in get a feel for for how it is. Uh you know, explore our working groups, attend these working groups, um soak it all in and then see uh eventually this is something you want

to be uh more directly involved in. Uh join a local community group meet up. So, we have cloud native community groups that are uh hosted by end users and vendors alike. So, the likes of IBM, Red Hat, AWS. Uh we have figures from New York Times, for example, who uh host these events, you know. Actually, I met Danielle in an event that was organized by one of

the uh employees from New York Times and it was, you know, it's it's a great place for networking, but it's also great place to meet the community and get a feel for what it is, right? Uh submit a case study. If you've done something and you uh perhaps feel impressed by it, I encourage you to do so because someone else will even if you don't think it's

the craziest thing in the world, I guarantee you someone else will see that same way and they might even be more excited than you are. Uh explore the conformance for vendors, right? Take a look at what our cloud native AI conformance is. Uh take a look at what our software conformance program is, what the service provider and what the training partner conformance programs are. Uh see if

this is a fit that that would be for you and coup stronaut. And if you are an individual contributor, uh you know, five Kubernetes certifications to achieve coup stronaut, get them all Pokémon style for golden coup stronaut. So, one thing I want you to do is also review the member benefits and and use the community pages and any questions you have, you know, just reach out to

anyone. David, do you want to jump And also, while you're here, I encourage you to check out our membership lounge. It's on the opposite corner of the of the venue. Uh we'll have a folks uh there that if you have questions about current benefits, if you are a company as a member or potentially what what membership could look like, we could definitely help you there as well.

Well, thank you everyone. It's been a good one. Take care. Any questions, we'll be here, so