The approach I've been taking on this has been from a slightly different perspective. Most definitions have started with the infrastructure and I'm starting from the application and working backwards.

Using a combination of the power company utility model and the airport "separation of concerns" model of Air traffic control and ground control, I've been defining the roles of a) An independent application or specialty platform, b) a cloud native application fabric and c) an infrastructure substrate.

The premise is that applications decompose into segments, each of which distill into a finite set of application workload patterns. These patterns align to composition, distribution and execution models which provide the characteristics and behaviors each specific pattern requires. Simply put, the jobs decompose as follows:

1) The application developer composes and describes the application
2) The app fabric recognizes the pattern, determines the best deployment pattern, transforms the workload and shops it for resources across a syndicate of infrastructure substrate providers (and technologies).
3) The infrastructure substrate executes the workload reliably at a local provider level

The fundamental shift notes that a cloud native app fabric scales business and technical functions implemented via software. As such, it can recognize demand using higher order indicators specific to functionality as opposed to traditional CPU, memory etc. As such, we align resource needs and utilization to meaningful business transactions and "right-size" supply with demand at the functional level.

If we take the technology, vendor and project names out of the picture and focus on capabilities we can describe this ecosystem in terms of enablers. Once we define these enablers and their roles in each of the three layers above we see pretty clearly that concepts like policy, orchestration etc. actually occur in several places and can draw the following parallels...

1) A baggage handler in New York has no need to know what a baggage handler in Atlanta is doing. Each does need to coordinate with their respective (and local) air traffic controller.
2) Air traffic control in Atlanta does need to be aware of what the ATC in New York is doing.
3) The blender Alexis uses to make us coctails does not care if the power it uses came from Georgia Power, Alabama Power or Florida power, nor does it care if it was generated using Coal, Hydro, Nuclear etc. power...
4) Georgia power does not sit in design meetings with the Xbox engineering team.
5) The system to generate power, handle luggage, load meals on planes etc. is free to innovate and be adopted independently from the ability to fly people around reliably.

My hopes for the CNCF reference model is that we show this reference model inclusive of the OCF and DAB and independent of the technologies, projects and products which can be used to enable the behaviors. I also hope that ongoing we maintain the list of these players and where they play when they implement according to the reference architecture.

Thoughts? Have I completely lost my mind?