Hi Saad,

Thanks for throwing your hat into the ring ! :-)

(apologies for the long email, but the info will hopefully benefit the rest of the mailing list too)

The CNCF SIGs are being setup to help the TOC as the CNCF continues to scale with the growing list of projects and members.

All the detail for the proposal/formation of the CNCF SIGs is available here: https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/master/sigs/cncf-sigs.md

In summary, the general objectives are:

• Strengthen the project ecosystem to meet the needs of end users and project contributors.
• Identify gaps in the CNCF project portfolio. Find and attract projects to fill these gaps.
• Educate and inform users with unbiased, effective, and practically useful information.
• Focus attention & resources on helping foster project maturity, systematically across CNCF projects.
• Clarify relationship between projects, CNCF project staff, and community volunteers.
• Engage more communities and create an on-ramp to effective TOC contribution & recognition.
• Reduce some project workload on TOC while retaining executive control & tonal integrity with this elected body.
• Avoid creating a platform for politics between vendors.

and the specific responsibilities of the SIG include:

Project Handling:

• Understand and document a high level roadmap of projects within this space, including CNCF and non-CNCF projects. Identify gaps in project landscape.
• For projects that fall within the CNCF, perform health checks.
• Perform discovery of and outreach to candidate projects
• Help candidate projects prepare for presentation to the TOC
• Every CNCF project will be assigned to one suitable SIG by the TOC.

End User Education (Outbound Communication)

• Provide up-to-date, high quality, unbiased and easy-to-consume material to help end users to understand and effectively adopt cloud-native technologies and practises within the SIG’s area, for example:
• White papers, presentations, videos, or other forms of training clarifying terminology, comparisons of different approaches, available projects or products, common or recommended practises, trends, illustrative successes and failures, etc.
• As far as possible, information should be based on research and fact gathering, rather than pure marketing or speculation.

End User Input Gathering (Inbound Communication)

• Gather useful end user input and feedback regarding expectations, pain points, primary use cases etc.
• Compile this into easily consumable reports and/or presentations to assist projects with feature design, prioritization, UX etc.

Community Enablement

• SIGs are open organizations with meetings, meeting agendas and notes, mailing lists, and other communications in the open
• The mailing list, SIG meeting calendar, and other communication documents of the SIG will be openly published and maintained

As Trusted Expert Advisors to the TOC

• Perform technical due diligence on new and graduating projects, and advise TOC on findings.
• Be involved with, or periodically check in with projects in their area, and advise TOC on health, status and proposed actions (if any) as necessary or on request.

See Example Responsibilities of a CNCF SIG.

The first set of SIGs as per the proposal and the TOC members who will act as liaison with the SIG are:

(from: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BUmTO5PFt7NZ9jVMMR3r1W7k8NANltNNJJqFCZdbS0I/edit#slide=id.g4e24cc378e_1_39)

• Matt: Traffic (networking, service discovery, load balancing, service mesh, RPC, pubsub, etc)

• Envoy, Linkerd, NATS, gRPC, CoreDNS, CNI
• Jeff: Observability (monitoring, logging, tracing, profiling, etc.)
• Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Jaeger, Cortex, OpenMetrics,
• Liz + Joe: Security/Governance (auth, authorization, auditing, policy enforcement, compliance, GDPR, cost management, etc)
• SPIFFE, SPIRE, Open Policy Agent, Notary, TUF,  Falco,
• Michelle + Alexis: App Dev, Ops & Testing (PaaS, Serverless, Operators, CI/CD,  Conformance, Chaos Eng, Scalability and Reliability measurement etc.)
• Helm, CloudEvents, Telepresence, Buildpacks, (CNCF CI)
• Brendan + Brian: Core and Applied Architectures (orchestration, scheduling, container runtimes, sandboxing technologies, packaging and distribution, specialized architectures thereof (e.g. Edge, IoT, Big Data, AI/ML, etc).
• Kubernetes, containerd, rkt, Harbor, Dragonfly, Virtual Kubelet
• Xiang: Storage (Block and File Stores, Databases, Key-Value stores etc)
• TiKV, etcd, Vitess, Rook

Hope this helps,

Kind Regards,

Alex