CNCF Landscape and Membership#

The CNCF Landscape is a map of the cloud native ecosystem, serving as the single source of truth for project classification and organizational membership within the CNCF 1. It attempts to categorize most projects and product offerings in the cloud native space — but not everything listed is an official CNCF project.

Official CNCF Projects vs. Ecosystem Entries#

The critical distinction in the landscape is whether an item has a project: field in landscape.yml:

• Official CNCF Projects — carry a project: field set to one of three maturity levels: graduated, incubating, or sandbox 2.
• Ecosystem-only entries — commercial products, vendor tools, and community projects that appear in the landscape without a project: field. These are not official CNCF projects 1.

Tip: When referencing landscape data, always check for the project: field to confirm CNCF membership status. The landscape includes many vendor and ecosystem entries that can cause confusion.

Project Maturity Levels#

All three maturity levels confer official CNCF project status. The key differences:

Projects are accepted at Sandbox and advance through a Due Diligence (DD) process voted on by the TOC with a 2/3 supermajority 3. The full lifecycle — including the Archived status for inactive projects — is documented in process/README.md 4.

Key advancement criteria:

• Incubation: ≥3 independent production adopters, documented governance, OpenSSF Best Practices badge, security self-assessment 5.
• Graduation: All incubation requirements plus a third-party security audit, maintainers from ≥2 organizations (demonstrating survivability), and a rigorous release process 6.

Timeline from application to decision typically ranges 5–15 months 7.

Membership Tiers#

Organizations listed in the landscape under the CNCF Members category are formal CNCF members. Tiers are represented as subcategories in landscape.yml 2:

Membership tier primarily governs Governing Board composition — business oversight, budget, and marketing. The TOC's 11 seats are filled through separate election mechanisms (project maintainers, end users, and GB appointees) rather than by membership tier alone.

End User designation (enduser: true in landscape.yml) is separate from membership tier. It marks organizations that primarily consume (rather than sell) cloud native technologies and participate in the End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB) 2. Examples include Apple, CVS Health, Capital One, and Fidelity Investments.

Maintainership and Membership#

Membership tier does not determine who can maintain CNCF projects. Maintainers are tracked centrally in foundation/project-maintainers.csv 8, which records each maintainer's name, GitHub username, affiliated organization, and link to the project's official OWNERS/MAINTAINERS file.

A vendor company may be a Gold member without having any maintainers in a given project, and individual contributors from non-member organizations can be maintainers. The TOC ensures governance remains vendor-neutral — graduation criteria explicitly require maintainers from at least two independent organizations 9.

Maintainer election rights to governance bodies:

• 1 TOC seat elected by maintainers of non-Sandbox projects
• 2 Governing Board seats elected by all CNCF project maintainers

Key References#