The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community. Strong TOC participation at this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in London enabled in-person discussions and strategic planning for CNCF project technical priorities in the coming years.
Maintainer Summit
The CNCF Maintainer Summit is an exclusive event for the people behind CNCF projects to gather face-to-face, collaborate, and celebrate the projects that make “Cloud Native.” The Maintainer summit, co-located with KubeCon, took place on March 31st at Excel London.The CNCF TOC was highly visible at the event, notably with TOC Chair Karena Angell co-chairing the summit. The event kicked off with a “Welcome to Your TOC” keynote featuring TOC members on stage, providing the CNCF maintainer community an opportunity for in-person interaction.
The TOCs led a well attended roundtable discussion around the TAG (Technical Advisory Groups) reboot. We had a wealth of new initiatives put forward and are all looking forward to seeing these develop in the upcoming months.
The TOC members also reviewed ideas from all workshop tables to select the winning proposal. The winning table proposed an idea around “Centralized Resource Management and Transparency” to establish a centralized service catalog for resource provisioning, effectively abstracting the complexity of resource management away from individual projects.
The TOC Offsite
The TOC held an offsite co-located event with KubeCon, where Bob Killen, Senior Technical Program Manager at CNCF, started with a TOC 101 session for the newly elected TOC members. They also did a SWOT analysis to reflect on the previous years’ activities. The priorities for the upcoming year were also discussed — including steering the TAG reboots, ensuring credibility, and emphasizing standardization.
TOC + TAB Discussion Highlights
The TOC also met with the TAB in a similar fashion to have a retrospective of the previous year’s activities and discuss the opportunities ahead. The discussion mainly revolved around giving more focus to end user adoption, and how to facilitate it.
TOC + GB Strategy Session
The TOC next met with the CNCF Governing Board for a very insightful meeting to discuss the strategies for the upcoming year. The meeting featured diverse discussions, including Brian Douglas, CNCF’s new Director of Ecosystem, leading a discussion on enhancing contributions of reference architectures and case studies. Mirko Boehm, LF Europe, presented on the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and its implications for open source projects. Karena Angell, TOC Chair, highlighted the need for better support and incentives for projects to advance maturity levels. Finally, Matt White, PyTorch Executive Director, along with Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF, and Todd Moore, SVP of Community Operations at the Linux Foundation, addressed the challenges and opportunities of AI innovation in Linux Foundation and CNCF projects.
TOC at the Keynotes
Apart from the usual responsibilities, the TOC had an amazing presence at the KubeCon keynote stage as well. Faseela K, Cloud Native Developer, Ericsson was the co-chair for KubeCon EU and hosted the keynotes for all three days. The second day of KubeCon keynotes saw Ricardo Rocha, Computing Engineer, CERN and Katie Gamanji, Senior Field Engineer, Apple on stage sharing the CNCF end user stories from Apple and CERN. Katie was also part of the Keynote panel “CNCF at 10”, where she discussed a decade of transformative growth within the CNCF ecosystem along with Joseph Sandoval, Principal Product Manager, Adobe and Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer, Isovalent at Cisco.
Day 3 keynotes had Faseela on stage with a panel on “Cloud Native Evolution in Telecom” with representation from end users Orange, Vodafone and Swisscom.
The TOC also had a solid keynote, “221B Cloud Native Street,” which was led by Katie Gamanji and Ricardo Kocha and summarized all the topics that were under discussion for the previous days. They did a great job in delivering the key messages to the wider audience including project maturity levels, the TAG reboot and the need for more focus on end users. They also discussed the identified gaps that will shape the future of the CNCF ecosystem – multicluster management, cost management and sustainability and tooling around infrastructure provisioning and secret management.
TOC Sessions @KubeCon
Apart from the keynotes, the TOC members had several other talks at the conference, including a TOC panel on the final day:
- Signed, Sealed, Delivered – Sign and Verify All the Things – Jeremy Rickard, Microsoft
- Balancing Cost and Efficiency: Day2 Optimization of Multi-Cluster AI Infrastructure – Kevin Wang, Huawei
TOC Panel
TOC also had a panel discussion on the final day to clarify any doubts or questions the KubeCon audience had regarding our work, as well as our priorities. There were many questions related to the TAG reboot initiative and concerns if the same will obstruct the project moving levels. Overall, the TAG reboot will serve to guide projects with better technical guidance to move between maturity levels as well as be better prepared for end user adoption.
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