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CNCF TAG Network

Primary Authors: Lee Calcote

Reviewed and Contributed to by: Matt Klein, Ken Owens

Introduction

With the increased prevalence of microservice-based distributed systems, networking as a discipline has never been more critical in the efficient operation of cloud native deployments. Networking primitives, including load balancing, observability, authentication, authorization, policy, rate limiting, QoS, mesh networks, legacy infrastructure bridging, and so on are now receiving substantial development and investment throughout the industry.

Mission Statement

TAG Network's charter is inspired from the CNCF Networking WG. With an ever steady eye to the needs of workloads and developers who create them and operators who run them, TAG Network's mission is to enable widespread and successful development, deployment and operation of resilient and intelligent network systems in cloud native environments through these activities to:

  1. Clarify and inform. Provide valuable and objective information to the TOC, End Users and Projects of the CNCF regarding areas considered in-scope. Strengthen the project ecosystem to meet the needs of end users and project contributors. Educate and inform users with unbiased, effective, and practically useful information.
  2. Collaborate and interrelate. Effectively interface with other related groups internal and external to the CNCF and connect the dots to facilitate meaningful collaborative progression of relevant topics. Engage more communities and create an on-ramp to effective TOC contribution & recognition.
  3. Assist and attract projects. Helping to maintain the continued health of CNCF networking-related projects. Focus attention and resources on helping foster project maturity, systematically across CNCF projects. Clarify relationship between projects, CNCF project staff, and community volunteers. Identify gaps in the landscape of CNCF networking-related projects. Find and attract projects to fill these gaps through invitation to present, diligence on proposed projects, and in essence, act as a funnel for TOC project reviews in this area.
  4. Afford impartial stewardship. Provide and maintain a vendor neutral venue for relevant thought validation, discussion, and project feedback. Establish procedures to assist where necessary.

In Scope

We strive to understand the fundamental characteristics of different networking approaches with respect to availability, scalability, performance, consistency, observability, security, ease-of-use, cost, performance and operational complexity; and relate these to their suitability to various cloud native use cases. Networks, network services and methodologies suitable for and commonly used in modern cloud-native environments are considered in scope:

Current CNCF Network-centric Projects

Generally, projects listed in the CNCF Landscape under the categories of Service Mesh, API Gateway, Coordination & Service Discovery, Service Proxy, Remote Procedure Call, and Cloud Native Network are considered in-scope of this TAG.

Out of Scope

Generally anything not considered in scope. The TAG may touch on physical networking hardware as it relates to the running of or interoperability of cloud native networking, but is not a stated focus of the TAG unto its own. See also Overlap and Relations with other Related Groups.

Overlap and Relations with other Groups and Projects

The area of networking interfaces with essentially all areas of the cloud native landscape.

Responsibilities and Deliverables

Clarify and further concepts of cloud native networking, traffic management and common design patterns and best practices of these network services. Explore definition and practicality of new cloud native networking technologies focused on serving distributed applications.

Responsibilities

Deliverables

Governance and Operations

This TAG follows the standard operating model provided by the TOC unless otherwise stated here.

Operating Model

Chairs:

In accordance with the elections and terms follow the governance.

Communications