KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 is just around the corner in Atlanta. While you’re mapping out your schedule for co-located events like Observability Day and Platform Engineering Day, don’t forget to connect with the groups laying the foundation for our entire ecosystem: the Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs).
If governance sounds boring, think again. TAGs are where the real work of defining best practices, solving pervasive technical problems, and shaping the future of cloud native happens. Here’s a quick guide to what TAGs are, what they cover, and the can’t-miss sessions they are hosting in Atlanta!
What exactly are CNCF TAGs?
At the heart of the CNCF is the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), which acts as the technical governing body. The TOC is responsible for defining the technical vision, approving new projects, and driving common practices across the entire CNCF portfolio.
TAGs serve as a crucial extension of the TOC. Their fundamental goal is to support the CNCF’s technical vision by solving problems faced by adopters. They work to:
1. Strengthen the project ecosystem: Ensuring projects meet the needs of both end users and contributors.
2. Act as a bridge: Surfacing common problems between projects and driving alignment.
3. Identify gaps: Performing landscape analysis to find missing areas in the CNCF project portfolio and attracting new projects to fill those gaps.
4. Provide expertise: Offering technical guidance for specific cloud native domain areas for projects and project adopters in line with TAG Charters.
Simply put, TAGs are the collective technical experts focusing on specific domains, ensuring our rapidly evolving ecosystem remains robust, consistent, and user-friendly.
Meet the new CNCF Technical Advisory Groups
The CNCF is transitioning to a set of refined TAGs designed to better address critical areas of cloud native development and operations. Here’s a look at some of the new groups and the fascinating technical ground they cover:
| TAG | Mission & Focus Areas |
| TAG Workloads Foundation | This group focuses on the core components of application execution. Its mission is to advance practices and standards for fundamental cloud native workload execution environments and their lifecycle management. Coverage includes: Containers, Virtual Machines, Serverless, Web Assembly (Wasm), Runtime, Scheduling, Orchestration, and CI/CD. |
| TAG Operational Resilience | Focusing heavily on “Day 2 Operations”—the period after deployment—this TAG defines best practices for building, operating, adopting, and managing resilient and efficient cloud native systems. Core topics include Observability, Management, Troubleshooting, Performance, Cost Efficiency, Energy Efficiency, and Chaos Engineering. |
| TAG Infrastructure | If it runs underneath your application, this TAG covers it. Their mission is to advance practices related to core cloud native infrastructure. Key focus areas include Data, Storage, Networking (DNS, Load Balancing, Service Mesh), Compute (including specialized primitives like GPUs and TPUs), Infrastructure Management, Edge computing, and Sovereignty. |
| TAG Security and Compliance | This TAG assists the TOC in ensuring secure, cloud native systems. They focus on security hygiene, Policy-as-code, Auditing, Threat Modeling, and the Secure Software Supply Chain. They also provide guidance on conforming to regulatory frameworks, such as the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act. |
| TAG Developer Experience (DevEx) | This group seeks to improve the end-to-end experience for developers. They focus on making it easier to build, test, deploy, and maintain cloud native applications. Scope includes Databases, Microservices, Streaming, Messaging, AI, API Management, Usability, and inner/outer loop best practices. |
Catch the TAGs and TOC live at KubeCon Atlanta!
Maintainer Summit Sessions (Monday, November 10): The following sessions are part of the Maintainer Summit (typically held on the first day, November 10) and are key for current and aspiring project contributors:
| Time | Session Title | Speakers |
11:30am – 12:05pm | Shaping the Future of Developer Experience: How TAG DevEx Supports CNCF Projects and Developers | Daniel Oh, Kevin Dubois, Mauricio Salatino, Julien Semaan, Mona Borham |
| 1:35pm – 2:10pm | Pathways, Not Roadblocks: TAG-Led Guardrails for Sustainable, High-Impact Contribution | Dylan Page, Marina Moore |
| 2:15pm – 2:50pm | Technical Leadership Coaching | Emily Fox, Karena Angell, Davanum Srinivas (“DIMS”), plus additional speakers to be announced |
Want to get involved or just learn more about the strategic directions these groups are taking? The TAGs and the TOC are hosting several critical sessions at KubeCon Atlanta (November 10-13, 2025).
Mark your calendars for these Maintainer Track and Community talks:
| Time | Session Title | Speakers | Category |
| 2:30pm – 3:00pm | Introducing TAG Workloads Foundation: Advancing the Core of Cloud Native Execution | Yuan Tang, Paco Xu, Marlow Weston, Rajas Kakodkar, Stephen Rust | Maintainer Track (M) |
| 5:00pm – 5:30pm | A Parallel World: Understanding CNCF’s TOC, TAGs, and TCGs | Eddie Knight | Maintainer Track (M) |
Wednesday, November 12
| Time | Session Title | Speakers | Category |
| 3:00pm – 3:30pm | Public End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB) Town Hall | TAB members | Cloud Native Experience (C) |
| 4:45pm – 5:15pm | Introduction To TAG Infrastructure | Dylan Page, Kashif Khan | Maintainer Track (M) |
| 5:30pm – 6:00pm | Building Resilient Cloud Native Infrastructure in the Second Decade – TAG Operational Resilience | Rafael Brito, Mario Fahlandt, Saiyam Pathak, Alolita Sharma, Nabarun Pal | Maintainer Track (M) |
| 5:30pm – 6:00pm | MUST/SHOULD/MAY – A Tour of TAG Security and Compliance Project Services | Evan Anderson, Brandt Keller | Maintainer Track (M) |
Thursday, November 13
| Time | Session Title | Speakers | Category |
| 11:45am – 12:15pm | Public Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) Meeting | Moderated by Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation | Cloud Native Experience (C) |
Find your place on the technical roadmap
TAGs are your chance to drive technical innovation, define standards, and collaborate with the deepest domain experts in the cloud native world. If you care about making cloud native more resilient, secure, or easier for everyone to use, check out these sessions and find out how you can contribute!
We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!