Exploring the Cloud Native Wilderness: CNCF Landscape A to Z

The story behind CNCF Landscape A to Z began over four years ago while working at an IoT company (Vosker). My teammates and I felt we weren’t doing enough technology watching. Balancing busy workloads with dedicated exploration time was a struggle, so we came up with a playful compromise: naming each of our development sprints after a tool from the CNCF landscape! 😆

What started as a handy little CLI utility to parse the official CNCF Landscape YAML file and select a bi-weekly candidate quickly became a fun routine. It gave us a continuous rhythm to discover new tooling—or at least get familiar with names on our sprint board every fortnight.

From Sprints to a Community Initiative

Last December, during the holiday break, I revisited the concept. I genuinely missed that steady bi-weekly discovery cadence. With modern AI tools emerging, I envisioned building curated summaries automatically without spending countless hours digging into repositories and documentation manually.

Naturally, ideas expanded: I registered the domain name 😝 and launched our companion Medium publication, aiming to publish focused write-ups about tools as we curated them. But between balancing commitments and tuning agents on a $0 budget (especially when model rate limits shifted), early research automation proved challenging.

Nine months later, the realization set in: we don’t need heavyweight AI systems or overcomplicated setups. Even with background agentic tooling assisting us, a clear watch list updated every other week delivers immense value on its own.

The Medium Publication: A Focused Home for Cloud Native

We’re bringing that vision to life with our Medium Publication.

Unlike broad tech publications that suffer from scope creep, our publication has an intentional, narrow focus: celebrating and breaking down the tools across the CNCF landscape. We warmly invite engineers, maintainers, and practitioners across the community to contribute and share their firsthand knowledge on any CNCF landscape tool.

What’s Next

Starting this coming January:

• Bi-Weekly Spotlights: Overviews of CNCF landscape tools starting with each letter of the alphabet every two weeks, shared directly on our Medium publication and right here on the blog.
• Website Improvements: Ongoing enhancements to our companion site and open-source tooling on cncf-landscape-a-to-z.com.
• Newsletter Digest: Packaging updates into a convenient email digest for quick inbox reading.

Check out the publication on Medium at medium.com/cncf-landscape-a-to-z, and join us as we explore the ecosystem together!