CNCF member company employee here. The working groups I've paid close attention to are very collaborative and open, they even preface their slide decks with a strict antitrust notice. Redpoint has an investment in and obviously some level of interest in one of their portfolio company's FaaS offering. It's kind of surprising that you prefice your comment on being "left out" while mentioning the aid of Redpoint. Has the CNCF or one of its working groups not been receptive when you or a team member has looked to contribute? How does your "censensus building" differ from what they are doing?

In any case, this thread might be a good place to call out specific differences between StdLib and those other, more established CNCF members.

I don’t have any bones to pick with the CNCF: we’ve had opportunities to get connected and become involved, it’s just not in our best interests at this point to be super proactive. There’s so much surface area left to innovate upon and we have a finite amount of resources (we doubled our team size recently and will be doubling again shortly). You’re doing a fantastic job, and this whitepaper is great! I’d love to add in our $0.02 in the future, but that’s probably best done over e-mail: you can email me or I’m happy to reach out.

The differences in consensus building we’re doing are specifically around Serverless APIs and Serverless technology as a means to lower the barrier to entry into software development as a whole. There are some moving parts here that I’m not comfortable sharing publicly yet, but they’ll be announced likely by end of quarter.

Your product is not interesting to me if it doesn't integrate with Prometheus, a CNCF-backed project. It sounds like you could stand to swallow your pride and interact with the community more.

I’m certainly proud of what we’re building and the great team we’ve pulled together. We happily support our own community of tens of thousands and growing, in the past two months alone we’ve sponsored five student Hackathons and introduced thousands of young, excited minds and the future of software development to “serverless” workflows.

These developers have built everything from passive notifiers to help the elderly [0] to smart city garbage collection bins that integrate with City’s Slack teams to notify when bins need to be changed [1].

Our team is active 24 hours per day at these events and more, shipping releases to both paying customers and free tier developers into the wee hours of the morning. We’re very lucky to have a small but motivated team of the most competent engineers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and we’re humbled to be working with companies tens to hundreds of times our size that do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue combined.

So, pride? Certainly. :) I just don’t think it’s the deadly-sin type you may be insinuating. It would be disingenuous to my team, our customers, and our Enterprise partners if I wasn’t proud of the work we’re doing (that’s not to say there’s not plenty of room for improvement! We’re constantly growing and responding to customer and developer needs.). However, we don’t have a single customer that has asked for (or even suggested) any sort of foundation membership at this point. We simply don’t have the resources to be part of a committee: we are already stretched thin with many boots on the ground doing work that, yes, we’re proud of. I’m not precluding it from the future, it’s just not on our roadmap right now.

Happy to understand how you think Prometheus may help us, though!

[0] https://twitter.com/shivkanthb/status/965409645136199680

[1] https://twitter.com/stdlibhq/status/960179903621750794

Just to be clear, membership in CNCF is not required to participate in any of our workgroups (including serverless [0]) or projects, such as Prometheus [1].

Disclosure: I'm executive director of CNCF.

[0] https://github.com/cncf/wg-serverless

[1] https://www.cncf.io/projects/

file an issue and we can add it to the serverless landscape: https://github.com/cncf/landscape/issues

Hey Chris,

Thank you so much for this. I received your e-mail as well and it means a lot you’d go through the effort to reach out directly. The team is really appreciative. Will follow up shortly - in the midst of travel. :)