Thanks Alexis.

Deciding which projects join the CNCF is one of the most important decisions the CNCF TOC is responsible for. And as far as I can tell, the only major requirement for joining the CNCF sandbox currently is support of "2 TOC sponsors".

My understanding is that these CNCF SIGs are being formed, at least in part, to help the TOC with that decision making. But from everything I've read, it doesn't seem like these SIGs will have any real ownership of anything.

So I propose that that in order to be inducted in to the CNCF (at any level, including Sandbox), an external project must get a CNCF SIG to sponsor it first? Each SIG would define the process for project consideration, establish criteria for the categories of project to be considered, etc.

This would give these new CNCF SIGs clear long-term ownership of something concrete, and we would ensure that the CNCF decision making process is open, transparent, and inclusive.

Of course, the TOC would still retain the right to veto the SIG decision, but it would do so publicly and provide justification for doing so.

Thoughts?

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 5:45 PM Alexis Richardson <alexis@...> wrote:

Saad

Unlike K8s TOC & SIGs, the CNCF TOC will own final decisions on
project acceptance.

alexis

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 5:37 PM via Lists.Cncf.Io
<saadali=google.com@...> wrote:

Thanks Quinton and Alex! This is very helpful.

Based on that, it seems to me like the responsibilities for this SIG are essentially to collect and disseminate storage related information in a consumable manner to 1) the CNCF TOC, 2) CNCF end users, and 3) CNCF projects (at all stages from pre-incubation through to graduation)?

If so, then the concrete work this group will be responsible for is conducting research (surveys, etc.) and the output will be documents summarizing the results of the research for various audiences?

The Storage Whitepaper produced by this group is out. User survey is in progress. What kind of work concretely do you see going forward?

In Kubernetes the TOC tries to avoid making unilateral decisions as much as possible. Instead the Kubernetes TOC empowers the SIGs to make decisions.

Right now the CNCF TOC is considering incubating a new storage project. Is the recommendation for accepting or rejecting that proposal be in the purview of this proposed SIG? If so, will the CNCF TOC sponsors have to get the approval of a SIG for any sponsored projects?

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 2:01 PM Alex Chircop <alex.chircop@...> wrote:

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









From: Saad Ali <saadali@...>
Date: Wednesday, 10 April 2019 at 21:38
To: Quinton Hoole <quinton@...>, cncf-wg-storage <cncf-wg-storage@...>, "cncf-toc@..." <cncf-toc@...>, Alex Chircop <alex.chircop@...>
Subject: CNCF Storage SIG - Mission/Purpose/Ownership?



Hi CNCF Storage WG,



Following up on the CNCF Storage WG meeting this morning: I'm considering throwing my hat in to the ring as a possible TL for the proposed CNCF Storage SIG. I'm currently Co-chair/TL of SIG Storage.



That said, I'd first like to understand what this new CNCF SIG will own?



The Kubernetes Storage SIG, for example, has clear ownership of the Kubernetes volume sub-system. This, CNCF storage workgroup, so far has produced whitepapers on the storage landscape, surveyed users, and hosted presentations from 3rd party storage projects. While all valuable, these are short term tasks.



My goal here is to make sure we act intentionally with a clear mission and purpose. A group without something to own will, at best, waste time, and, at worst, cause unnecessary conflict. To that end, I want to make sure the SIG has an obvious, long-term ownership of something concrete.



Thoughts? What do we think will be the long term sustainability strategy for this new SIG? What will it own?



Thanks,



Saad Ali