I think this goes back to what is the charter of the CNCF.


Taking a few short cuts in this narrative and avoiding some of the politics.
Containers became mainstream when docker "standardized" their use. The
industry saw this rapid adoption and suggested a forum should "govern" these
standards which resulted in the OCP->OCI. From the OCI charter,
"...industry participants may easily contribute to building a
vendor-neutral, portable and open specification and runtime...". So we have
both a spec and working code.


What was missing, was the equivalent for container management (orchestrator,
control plane, monitoring) solutions. I believe this was the genesis of the
CNCF, originated by Craig and why k8s was the initial project. The original
reference architecture provided a simple view of these functional
components. BTW, most would see the similarities between this and OpenStack
for VMs. I personally have no interest in seeing the CNCF focused on one
implementation.


Assuming I'm not completely off the path, the target audience for the ref
arch is anyone assembling a container management solution (orchestrator,
control plane etc.) and anyone attempting to build a functional component
that would fit within that architecture. Pretty much every company I've
spoken with is currently rolling their own from a select set of open source
projects and developing their own glue to fill gaps and stitch the pieces
together. (My company is doing that for our own SaaS solutions.) There are
a few of us interested in extending what we see as one of the needed
functional components. However, we are unclear on how others see that
interfacing with other components and in some cases see overlapping
capabilities. We can certainly just put it out there and see if there is
adoption, but then that begs the question as to what value does the CNCF
actually provide other than marketing.


I'll stop before this becomes too much of a ramble, for comments.


Alan





________________________________
From: Alexis Richardson <alexis@weave.works>
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 4:54 AM
To: cncf-toc@lists.cncf.io
Subject: audience for "reference architecture" content

Hi all,

Yesterday we had our 2nd discussion about the 'marketecture' stack that Ken
and I put out. One piece of feedback, from Doug Davis by email, and then eg
from Alan Conley on the call, was that much more detail could help.

I believe this is a "target audience" issue. We may need different material
for different audiences even if those audiences are all "technical". For
example - I argued that for developer end users, less detail is good.

It would be very helpful to hear from the people advocating for more detail,
regarding their target audience.

alexis