CNCF Scales Sandbox Approval Process to Meet Growing Demand from New Projects

By AIT News Desk On Jul 9, 2020

New process iterations result in 11 new projects accepted into the CNCF Sandbox

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced a new simplified process for projects looking to join the CNCF Sandbox that will increase the acceptance of new projects into the CNCF, as well as reduce barriers for open source projects seeking neutral grounds to accelerate their innovation, adoption velocity, and community building efforts.

The CNCF Sandbox provides an avenue for technically interesting projects that are beneficial to the cloud native community that the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) believes warrant experimentation. The Sandbox provides a neutral home to foster collaborative development, and is the preferred path for early-stage projects to enter the CNCF.

“The CNCF Sandbox has long played an important role enabling neutral collaboration and experimental cloud native projects to thrive, but with record demand by projects to join the CNCF community, we agreed that the process could be refined in new ways to speed the review and approval process,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “I’m thrilled that the CNCF TOC has put in place a great new process that simplifies the barrier to entry for worthy projects and increases innovation, which recently led to 11 new Sandbox projects being accepted.”

The CNCF Sandbox is an entry point for projects into the ecosystem and has four goals:

Encourage public visibility of experiments or other early work that can add value to the CNCF mission and build the ingredients of a successful Incubation level project.
Facilitate alignment with existing projects if this is desired.
Nurture projects via CNCF Service Desk requests.
Allow for open governance and remove possible legal obstacles to adoption and contribution by ensuring all projects adhere to CNCF legal, code of conduct and IP Policy requirements.

Key changes to the Sandbox process include a simplified submission process using an application process that asks the project owners how their project fits as part of the Cloud Native ecosystem. Applications are listed in a publicly-viewable spreadsheet for comment, with review by the TOC now scheduled on a bi-monthly cadence, Special Interest Group (SIG) recommendation and TOC sponsorship are replaced by a straightforward vote by the TOC.

The 11 newly accepted Sandbox projects offer a mix of cutting-edge technologies featuring chaos engineering, cloud native security, cross cloud control planes, service meshes and more.