Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has become the cornerstone for organizations transitioning to cloud native technologies. As enterprises move away from monolithic architectures toward microservices and container-based solutions, CNCF provides the tools, standards, and a thriving ecosystem to help them succeed. The CNCF Landscape, a constantly evolving chart, captures the richness and breadth of this ecosystem.
What is the CNCF Landscape?
The CNCF Landscape (available here) is a visual representation of the cloud native technology ecosystem, categorizing thousands of open source projects that fall under the cloud native umbrella. It provides a structured view of the technologies, from container orchestration and monitoring to networking, security, and storage, allowing users to quickly navigate this ever-expanding universe.
Key Categories in the CNCF Landscape
- Container Orchestration & Management: At the core of cloud native is containerization, and Kubernetes stands as the industry standard for container orchestration. Other tools like Helm, ArgoCD, and Flux play significant roles in simplifying container management and automation especially the deployment with GitOps approach.
- Microservices & Service Meshes: As cloud native applications are predominantly microservice-based, service meshes like Istio and Linkerd are essential for managing the complexity of inter-service communication, observability, and security.
- Monitoring & Observability: With distributed systems becoming the norm, monitoring and observability have become critical. The CNCF Landscape features tools like Prometheus for metrics, Jaeger for tracing, and Fluentd for log aggregation to ensure the health and performance of cloud native applications.
- Networking & Security: Tools for networking especially CNI like Cilium and Calico, help ensure secure and reliable communication between cloud native components. Security tools such Falco integrate security deeply into the cloud native workflow, automating threat detection and vulnerability management.
- Storage & Data: Cloud native storage solutions like Rook, Portworx, and Vitess bring distributed storage to Kubernetes environments, allowing organizations to manage large-scale data requirements effectively and efficiently.
- Serverless: Serverless computing, represented by projects like Knative and OpenFaaS, allows developers to build applications that scale automatically without managing servers, focusing entirely on application code.
Maturity Level of CNCF Projects
A project that is accepted into CNCF goes through different maturity level, namely sandbox, incubating and graduated.
- Sandbox: projects that are just accepted to CNCF landscape and are early in their lifecycle
- Incubating: projects that are maturing in a healthy way from their early life
- Graduated: production-ready projects that crossed the chasm and are being adopted by many organizations to run their production workload
- Archived: projects that has become "dormant" or inactive for sometime
As of now (at the time of writing), there are about 30 graduated, more than 30 incubating and more than 100 sandbox projects. So, if you are interested to explore the CNCF landscape go to the official page here.
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