CNCF Landscape and Membership#

The CNCF Landscape is the single source of truth for project classification and organizational membership in the cloud native ecosystem 1. It maps hundreds of projects and products, but not everything listed is an official CNCF project — the key is how entries are tagged in landscape.yaml.

Official CNCF Projects vs. Ecosystem Entries#

An entry is an official CNCF project only if it carries a project: field in landscape.yaml set to one of three maturity levels 1:

Entries without a project: field are ecosystem-only — commercial products, vendor tools, or community projects that appear in the landscape but are not official CNCF projects 1. When in doubt, always check for the project: field before treating something as an official CNCF project.

Project Lifecycle and Advancement#

Projects enter at Sandbox and advance through a Due Diligence (DD) process voted on by the TOC (requiring a 2/3 supermajority) 1. The full lifecycle — including the Archived status for inactive projects — is defined in the TOC's process/README.md.

Key advancement thresholds 1:

• Incubation: ≥3 independent production adopters, documented governance, OpenSSF Best Practices badge, security self-assessment.
• Graduation: All incubation requirements plus a third-party security audit and maintainers from ≥2 independent organizations.

Membership Tiers#

Organizations formally affiliated with CNCF appear in the CNCF Members category in landscape.yaml, subdivided into tiers 1:

End User designation (enduser: true) is separate from membership tier — it marks organizations that primarily consume rather than sell cloud native technology, and participate in the End User TAB 1.

Membership tier governs Governing Board composition, not TOC composition. The TOC's 11 seats are filled via separate election mechanisms (GB appointees, end user reps, and maintainer-elected reps), independent of vendor tier.

Project Maintainers#

Membership tier does not determine who can maintain CNCF projects. The authoritative maintainer registry is foundation/project-maintainers.csv 2, which records for each maintainer:

• Project and maturity level
• Maintainer name, GitHub username, and employer affiliation
• Link to the project's official OWNERS or MAINTAINERS file

The file contains 2,400+ rows spanning all CNCF maturity levels 3. A vendor can be a Gold member without having any maintainers in a given project, and individual contributors from non-member organizations can be listed maintainers.

Graduation criteria explicitly require maintainers from at least two independent organizations to ensure vendor-neutral, survivable governance 1.

Maintainer election rights to governance bodies 1:

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

Key References#