Sandbox Project Proposal Template

[erinaboyd]

CNCF SIG Sandbox Project Request Template & Promotion Template

<Promotion/Acceptance> to CNCF <Incubation/Sandbox>

Primary aim: This template helps a project to prepare for a presentation to the SIG, and then helps the SIG share the collated information with the TOC.

Authors:

Background

Link to TOC PR

Link to Presentation

Link to GitHub project

Project Goal

Current Status

Future Plans

Project Scope

Clear project definition

Does the project have a clear and well defined scope

Value-add to the CNCF ecosystem

Does the project have a clear value add to the current project ecosystem. How does it relate to other projects with overlapping capabilities.

Alignment with other CNCF projects

Does the project align and actively collaborate with other CNCF projects?

Does the project require any specific versions of projects (or APIs) to interoperate? (e.g. K8s API, CSI, CNI, CRI)?

Does the project augment or benefit other CNCF projects?

Anticipated use cases

What problems does the project solve?

Alignment with SIG Reference Model

Does the project align with the SIG CNCF reference model and which capabilities does it require/provide at each level of the reference model.

High level architecture

Describe the overall architecture of the project. Feel free to add diagrams.

Formal Requirements

Document that the project fulfills the requirements as documented in the CNCF graduation criteria for sandbox

Are there any anticipated issues with any of the criteria ?

Has the TOC been approached for sponsorship? If yes, which TOC members have agreed to sponsor the project?

CNCF IP Policy

Becoming a sandbox project requires adoption of the CNCF IP Policy: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/master/charter.md#11-ip-policy

Note: there is a grace period after becoming a sandbox period to enable projects to adopt the policy, however, some prep is required to ensure there are no major blockers.

Has the IP policy been reviewed?

List the repos for the project and their current license

List any dependent repos (upstream/downstream) that are required to build the project (including but not limited to libraries, commercial tools, plugins)

What actions are required to be compliant with the IP policy?

Other Considerations

Please note, these are not gating criteria but rather to:

• Collect a standard set of information for each project
• Provides a point in time capture of the state of the project which makes it easier to track progress at future reviews and / or promotion
• Help projects to prepare for SIG and TOC presentation
• Allow the SIG to review the project and perform due diligence for incubation
• Provide the TOC with the information required to accept sponsorship of a project and/or votes
• Identify and rectify any significant issues / blockers prior to presenting to the TOC and acceptance as a CNCF project

Cloud Native

Does the project meet the definition of Cloud Native? The CNCF charter states:

“Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.


“These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.”

Project and Code Quality

Are there any metrics around code quality? Are there good examples of code reviews? Are there enforced coding standards?

What are the performance goals and results? What performance tradeoffs have been made? What is the resource cost?

What is the CI/CD system? Are there code coverage metrics? What types of tests exist?

Is there documentation?

How is it deployed?

How is it orchestrated?

How will the project benefit from acceptance into the CNCF?

Has a security assessment by the security SIG been done? If not, what is the status/progress of the assessment?

Promotion to Incubation

Open Governance

How are committers chosen?

How are architectural and roadmap decisions made?

How many decision makers are outside the sponsoring organization.

Adoption

Who are the current maintainers?

How long has the project been developed for?

Is there a commercial version of the project or a primary commercial sponsor ?

Is the project used in production? If so, please list some of the accounts.

Does the project participate in a CNCF User Group?

Vendor Independence

Is the project reasonably independent from the sponsoring vendor?

Are all communication channels and project resources hosted just for this project or with other CNCF projects/resources?

Is all code that is part of the project hosted and part of the CNCF managed orgs and repos?

Are all defaults for upstream reporting either unset or community hosted infrastructure (i.e. doesn’t point to vendor hosted SaaS control plane or analytics server for usage data)? Is all project naming independent of vendors?

Relevant Assets regarding vendor independence

[ultrasaurus]

It might be helpful to move the content to a PR and update the issue to reflect the problem that we're attempting to solve with the template (for folks who haven't been directly involved). From my perspective, having a template will

• reduce the work for individuals who are volunteering to help with the process (SIG Chairs/Tech leads, TOC members/contributors, etc)
• increase transparency in the process

Thanks @erinaboyd for your work on this!

[xiang90]

@erinaboyd

Thanks for putting this up.

A few comments:

Some of the general questions are duplicate with the initial toc proposal here: https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/master/process/project_proposals.adoc#cncf-project-proposal-process-v12. I suggest to remove the duplicated questions from this template and link to the proposal one.

Has the TOC been approached for sponsorship? If yes, which TOC members have agreed to sponsor the project?

The intention is to sponsor projects after the SIG assessment. And we shall discourage projects to reach out TOC members individually before that is done.

[AloisReitbauer]

LGTM.

I also added a section at the end for review summary and recommendation to the project for things they should address going forward.

[lizrice]

I would be very supportive of having a first version of the template published quickly, which we can iterate on

[raravena80]

+1 to move this to a PR and getting it published so we can iterate.

[xiang90]

@erinaboyd @lizrice

as #335 gets merged. shall we create a PR for adding this template?

[erinaboyd]

@xiang90 yes I will remove the TOC sponsor solicitation blurb...good idea

[resouer]

@erinaboyd Just check if you will move this to a PR?

We have several on-going sandbox level candidates need to change to this template.

[erinaboyd]

@resouer already did #361 :)

[erinaboyd]

@lizrice do we need to revisit this?

[michelleN]

@amye - should we close this in favor of the new sandbox form process?

[amye]

Yes, sounds like a plan.