The CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB) serves as the voice of the end user community to ensure that the needs and perspectives of end users are represented effectively in CNCF community decisions. Since its formation in 2023, the TAB has primarily focused on three initiatives: reference architectures, CNCF project health, and increasing end user feedback for CNCF projects.
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in London, the TAB had the opportunity to meet privately as a group and in a joint session with the TOC to review and refine priorities for 2025. In the dedicated TAB meeting, we focused on how to streamline our work to accelerate progress throughout the year. During the joint session, we explored various ways the TAB can support and complement the TOC’s efforts.
Priorities for 2025
With so much happening in the cloud native community and an ever-growing end user ecosystem, prioritizing where to focus the TAB’s efforts isn’t easy. The items below reflect the outcomes of numerous discussions and exchanges amount end users.
Introducing Public Meetings
We know not everyone is familiar with the TAB yet – but we’re working to change that. We are taking steps to build stronger connections with the broader End User Community and make it easier to get involved. As such, we are launching a monthly TAB meeting where CNCF end user members are invited to join to learn about ongoing initiatives, share feedback, and help guide how end users engage within the CNCF ecosystem. These meetings will take place on the third Monday of each month and are open to all CNCF end user members.
The first public meeting is on Monday, June 16th 2025 at 8am PT / 5pm CET.
Revisit End User Groups
The CNCF has hosted various end user groups over the years, with different levels of activity and momentum. These groups have provided valuable opportunities for end users across different verticals—such as research, finance, and automotive—to exchange ideas and advance common themes, often resulting in proposals to projects or collaborative sessions at cloud native events.
In 2025, we will evaluate the existing groups to better understand how to enhance their impact. Key areas of interest include engaging impacted end users when projects raise health issues and involving adopters in interviews during the TOC’s due diligence process for project maturity graduation.
Feedback Loops
A common request from CNCF projects is to have more direct communication with end users. This helps gather more relevant feedback while validating new features prior to releases, during design discussions, and addressing topics like scalability or performance. Similarly, end users often request a dedicated forum to connect more directly with projects and other end users, separate from the direct discussions with maintainers.
This initiative aims to establish a new workflow to improve the feedback process between projects and end users, while adding additional adoption metrics for maintainers and product managers downstream.
Project Health
The maturity levels defined by the TOC are a valuable metric for end users and adopters of CNCF projects, establishing the confidence needed around stability, production readiness, security, compliance, and governance. Most of the review process happens during due diligence for incubation and graduation, but the process isn’t perfect yet. The TAB wants to help automate health checks by better leveraging end user feedback.
Visit the End User TAB GitHub repo for details on how to get involved in the CNCF End User Community.
We look forward to seeing CNCF End User members at the first End User TAB public meeting on June 16th at 8am PT / 5pm CET.