The cloud native landscape guide was initiated by the CNCF Business Value Subcommittee and Cartografos group. It was authored by Jason Morgan and Catherine Paganini, edited and reviewed by Simon Forster and Ihor Dvoretskyi, built by Jordi Noguera with UX consultation from Andrea Velázquez.
Introduction
If you’ve researched cloud native applications and technologies, you’ve probably come across the CNCF cloud native landscape. Unsurprisingly, the sheer scale of it can be overwhelming. So many categories and so many technologies. How do you make sense of it?
As with anything else, if you break it down and analyze it one piece at a time, you’ll find it’s not that complex and makes a lot of sense. In fact, the map is neatly organized by functionality and, once you understand what each category represents, navigating it becomes a lot easier.
In this guide, we’ll break this mammoth landscape down and provide a high-level overview of its layers, columns, and categories.
What is the cloud native landscape?
The goal of the cloud native landscape is to compile and organize all cloud native open source projects and proprietary products into categories, providing an overview of the current ecosystem. Organizations that have a cloud native project or product can submit a PR to request it to be added to the landscape.
How to use this guide
In this guide, you’ll find one chapter per layer and column which discusses each category within it. Categories are broken down into: what it is, the problem it addresses, how it helps, and technical 101. While the first three sections assume no technical background, the technical 101 is targeted to engineers just getting started with cloud native. We also included a section for associates buzzwords and lists CNCF projects
INFOBOX
When looking at the landscape, you’ll note a few distinctions:
- Projects in large boxes are CNCF-hosted open source projects. Some are still in the incubation phase (light blue/purple frame), while others are graduated projects (dark blue frame).
- Projects in small white boxes are open source projects.
- Products in gray boxes are proprietary products.
Please note that new projects are continuously becoming part of the CNCF so always refer to the actual landscape – things are moving fast!
Provisioning
Provisioning is the first layer in the cloud native landscape. It encompasses tools that are used to create and harden the foundation on which cloud native apps are built. You’ll find tools to automatically configure, create, and manage the infrastructure, as well as for scanning, signing, and storing container images. The layer also extends to security with tools that enable policy setting and enforcement, embedded authentication and authorization, and the handling of secrets distribution. That’s a mouthful, so let’s discuss each category at a time.
Automation & Configuration
What it is
Automation and configuration tools speed up the creation and configuration of compute resources (virtual machines, networks, firewall rules, load balancers, etc.). Tools in this category either handle different parts of the provisioning process or try to control everything end-to-end. Most provide the ability to integrate with other projects and products in the space.
Problem it addresses
Traditionally, IT processes relied on lengthy and labor intensive manual release cycles, typically between three to six months. Those cycles came with lots of human processes and controls that slowed down changes to production environments. These slow release cycles and static environments aren’t compatible with cloud native development. To deliver on rapid development cycles, infrastructure must be provisioned dynamically and without human intervention.
How it helps
Tools of this category allow engineers to build computing environments without human intervention. By codifying the environment setup it becomes reproducible with the click of a button. While manual setup is error prone, once codified, environment creation matches the exact desired state — a huge advantage.
While tools may take different approaches, they all aim at reducing the required work to provision resources through automation.
Technical 101
As we move from old-style human-driven provisioning to a new on-demand scaling model driven by the cloud, the patterns and tools we used before no longer meet our needs. Most organizations can’t afford a large 24×7 staff to create, configure, and manage servers. Automated tools like Terraform reduce the level of effort required to scale tens of servers and networks with hundreds of firewall rules. Tools like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible provision and/or configure these new servers and applications programmatically as they are spun up and allow them to be consumed by developers.
Some tools interact directly with the infrastructure APIs provided by platforms like AWS or vSphere, while others focus on configuring the individual machines to make them part of a Kubernetes cluster. Many, like Chef and Terraform, can interoperate to provision and configure the environment. Others, like OpenStack, exist to provide an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment that other tools could consume. Fundamentally, you’ll need one or more tools in this space as part of laying down the computing environment, CPU, memory, storage, and networking, for your Kubernetes clusters. You’ll also need a subset of these to create and manage the Kubernetes clusters themselves.
There are now over 5 CNCF projects in this space, more if you count projects like Cluster API which don’t appear on the landscape. There is also a very robust set of other open source and vendor provided tools.
