The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) provides a variety of services and benefits to our projects to help make them more successful. The list below essentially represents each of the services that we have in the past provided to any project. We remain open to providing additional services, so if there are things you would like that are not listed, or if you have an issue but have not yet formulated your exact request, please still reach out to us.
To improve access to CNCF services, we are implementing a service desk to serve as a single point access for all CNCF services. We’re modeling this on the 3-1-1 service that Mayor Bloomberg rolled out in New York City to provide single point of access to all municipal services. Project maintainers that are used to interacting with CNCF staff members directly by email or Slack are welcome to continue to do so, and it will be that staff member’s responsibility to log the request in the CNCF ServiceDesk.
CNCF’s services fall in the following general categories:
- Foundation
- Event management (host your own event or have a track)
- Program management (governance, staff, third-party services)
- Marketing services and programs (webinars, blogs, case studies, newsletters)
- Marketing communications (press and analyst relations, social media management)
- Certification and training services (expert certification, software conformance, training)
- Legal services (trademark, copyright, patents, licenses)
- Internationalization
- The CNCF provides a variety of services and benefits to our projects to help make them more successful. Neutrality requires that projects contribute their trademark to CNCF so that: no company is favored over any other and CNCF ensures project governance is transparent and fair for everyone.
- A neutral home for your project increases the willingness of developers from other enterprise software companies, start-ups and independent developers to collaborate, contribute, and become committers
- Endorsement by members of the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee is an independent signal of the quality of your project
- Engagement with the CNCF’s End User community of leading companies doing cutting-edge cloud native deployments
- Existing committers still control your project, and we just ask that you document a neutral governance process
- Tens of thousands of dollars per year to improve project documentation
- Maintain your committers, just commit to an unbiased process to elect additional committers
CNCF Projects may freely select their own tools but the CNCF staff recommends and has existing relationships with these tools:
- Zoom video conferencing Pro accounts for video meetings, recordings, and scheduling
- OpsGenie account for on-call rotations for production services, security disclosure lists, or other needs
- LastPass to manage to shared secrets
- Netlify for improved workflow/automation around documentation and websites
- Discourse for community discussion (e.g., https://discuss.kubernetes.io)
- FOSSA for license and security scanning
- HackerOne for bug bounties
- Cloud computing infrastructure - CNCF Community Infrastructure Lab, AWS and GCP credits.
- Collaborate with our full-time press and analyst relations teams to increase awareness and excitement of the projects
- Receive regular reports on press mentions and comparisons to similar projects
- Leverage the expertise of its parent organization, The Linux Foundation, which hosts other successful projects including Hyperledger, ONAP, the Linux kernel, Let’s Encrypt, and Node.js. For example, CNCF arranged a collaboration between Kubernetes developers and Linux Foundation fellow and stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman to discuss high-velocity software development techniques
- Access to full-time CNCF staff who are eager to assist your project in myriad ways and help make it successful
- Participate in the CNCF cross-project, cross-cloud continuous integration program
- Security audits by independent third parties (e.g., https://coredns.io/2018/03/15/cure53-security-assessment/)
- Distributed systems safety research via independent third parties (e.g., https://jepsen.io/)
- Events are a part of CNCF’s core strategy and they help your project build a community with face-to-face interaction and knowledge sharing
- Create a track for your project at our KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events with our world-class events team, bringing together vendors, developers and end users. We host events every year in Europe, China, and North America. In addition, we can help create a custom conference for you
- Run events targeted specifically for your project (like PromCon or EnvoyCon), and/or be a sponsor at those events
- Travel funding available for your non-corporate-backed developers and to increase attendance of women and other underrepresented minorities
- Connect to our worldwide network of Cloud Native meetup groups and ambassadors to raise awareness of your project. We will also help sponsor meetup groups dedicated to your project so food and beverages can be provided
- Host a set of well-received networking events with leading VCs, which provides additional visibility for projects
- CNCF assists with the events of its parent, the Linux Foundation, which are called Open Source Summits (OSS) and held every year in North America, Europe, Japan, and China, as well as the invitation-only Open Source Leadership Summit
- CNCF assists with sponsorship leads, media introductions, co-location opportunities and marketing of the event
- CNCF sponsors over 30 third-party cloud events each year including, OSCON, Google Next, AWS Reinvent, DockerCon, Microsoft Build and more
- We promote all CNCF projects and for questions, our staff and volunteers can’t answer, we forward them to the relevant project owner
- Project contributors are welcome to use our booth as a "home base" for meeting colleagues
- CNCF organizes smaller events like the Kubernetes Software Conformance Working Group meetings for 10-30 people every couple months
CNCF provides a full portfolio of marketing services to support community and ecosystem engagement, including:
- Content ranges from webinars, CNCF blog, Kubernetes blogs, KubeWeekly, case studies, newsletters, presentations etc
- Oversee blog editorial calendars and writing, editing, and/or identifying and funding freelancers to develop content
- Quarterly project media velocity reports (e.g., for gRPC)
- Pre-ordered, project-branded swag via CNCF store
- Help develop the project website
- For example, CNCF recently took over the management of Kubernetes.io from Google
- Recently we took over the redesign of Kubernetes Community site while the project maintainers continue to manage it
- Generate positive media and analyst coverage to create greater awareness of project milestones, community growth, and developer engagement
- Promote project news and milestones through other channels: journalists, analysts, and news releases/blogs
- Identify top publications/podcasts (Bloomberg, Changelog, eWeek, Fortune, Forbes, InfoWorld, The New Stack, etc.) and develop plans to earn coverage through contributed articles, quotes, interviews, and news pick-up
- Develop thought leadership reports, surveys, success stories, and case studies (print and video)
- Manage social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, WeChat)
- Secure analyst briefings for inclusion in reports: Gartner, Forrester, IDC, RedMonk, 451 Research and more
- Coordinate speakers’ bureaus for key maintainers/developers (e.g. developer-driven conference panels)
- Organize media/analyst luncheons,1:1 meetings at key events (for example, we are arranging over 30 press and analysts attend CloudNativeCon + KubeCon China and we help schedule back-to-back meetings with project maintainers and contributors for many of them)
CNCF has made a major investment to implement training, expert certification and provider certification programs for Kubernetes. Over time, we expect to expand these to cover other projects as well
- Free Introduction to Kubernetes course on edX MOOC (~44000 enrollments): https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-kubernetes
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam (over 4700 registrants): https://www.cncf.io/certification/cka
- CKA Developer course (CKAD): Kubernetes for Developers: https://www.cncf.io/certification/ckad
- CNCF is working with The Linux Foundation training team to develop self-paced online courses that can scale up a project’s reach beyond what’s possible using instructor-led courses
- CNCF legal resources respond to threatened litigation (e.g., we worked with the Kubespray maintainers to change their name back from Kargo after receiving a cease and desist letter)
- CLA system that integrates with GitHub (identity.linuxfoundation.org/projects/cncf)
- DCO system that integrates with GitHub
- Access to CNCF and LF staff should any legal questions arise
- Protect trademarks, such as a UDRP action to take over kubernetes.cn
We remain open to providing additional services, so if there are things you would like that is not listed, or if you have an issue but have not yet formulated your exact request, please still reach out to us at info@cncf.io.
We offer internationalization support for projects that require blog posts translated into Chinese or other languages. For examples, see the TiKV and Harbor blog posts.
We have a professional staff located in China that can help your project present at local meetups and events. Also, we host one of the largest open source conferences, KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China every year and offer simultaneous live translations of presentations in both Chinese and English.
If you’re a CNCF project committer/maintainer, all you have to do is visit https://servicedesk.cncf.io to request support.
All CNCF maintainers are listed here.
Projects are welcome to use their own tools in CNCF, we are a strong supporter of choice and flexibility. If you're interested in using a new tool and want CNCF to officially support it, please file a ticket and we will see what we can do to help!
Yes, you should receive a response within 48 hours.
CNCF doesn't set a set amount of budget for each project and will work with you best on your needs.
GitHub has also recently improved the ability to do security disclosures and generate CVEs, we recommend projects use this: https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-security-vulnerabilities/about-github-security-advisories#cve-identification-numbers - As a backup, you can submit a CVE use the MITRE CVE submission form: https://cve.mitre.org/cve/request_id.html (The CNCF is currently not an CNA).
CNCF doesn't enforce the projects to use any specific tool for sharing credentials, passwords or other confidential information, however we recommend using Keybase.
CNCF prefers projects evaluate using our Community Cluster first. We have partnered with the variuos providers that offer discounted or free services for the CNCF projects. For example, the CNCF projects may use the credits, offered by Amazon Web Services for CNCF for the upstream testing, CI/CD and other purposes. See the Tools sections on this page for more details.
To benefit from one of these offers, please submit the Service Desk ticket with the detailed descrition of the request, including the purpose, list of the desired services and a rough cost.
Head to https://servicedesk.cncf.io and try to login, if you can't find an account, email info@cncf.io and one will be created for you.
Email info@cncf.io and one will be created for you.
If you aren't happy with the service provided by CNCF staff or with a resolution of an issue, you have a couple of options. If it's a technical matter, you can appeal to the TOC https://github.com/cncf/toc and if it's a budget related matter you can appeal to the CNCF Developer Representatives on the GB.