I am using this list as it most likely reaches the widest audience in the CNCF.

In recent discussions in the app delivery SIG we came to the conclusion that a reference application would make sense that a) has most of the characteristics of real world applications b) can be used to demonstrate good practices and also how certain CNCF tools can be used to solve common problems.

Having a reference application – or multiple -  when we are talking about app delivery makes a lot of sense.

Looking at the most widely used applications you undoubtedly end up with Hipstershop, Sockshop or one of their variants. While these apps are nice to demo what a cloud-native application can look like, they also miss key characteristics like stateful workloads, third party integrations, secrets, multi-stage configurations, databases, …. .

I also assume that many CNCF project have their own demo applications to demonstrate their capabilities.

Alexis made the proposal to fork one of more of the demo applications over in a CNCF demo-apps org. This, however, only makes sense if there is active development on this demo.  It might be even better to have the demo app together with the development community behind actively participate in the CNCF – by e.g. donating the app as a sandbox project.

So, to get more concrete, a couple of questions to get feedback on:

• Do you think it makes sense to have a cloud-native demo app?
• If you run a project to you have an app for demos and would you want to contribute to a joined demo app?
• If you think it makes sense, what would be your preferred idea to move this forward (donate, fork, create new ….)

Obviously, as this idea matures this need direction and discussion in the TOC. I am using this email to kick off the discussion and collect some first data points.

// Alois