Cloud Native Operational Excellence (CNOE): A Joint Effort to Share Internal Developer Platform Tools and Best Practices 

Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, Salesforce, and Twilio have come together to launch an open source initiative for building internal developer platforms (IDPs). Cloud Native Operational Excellence (aka, CNOE, pronounced Kuh.noo) is a joint effort to share developer tooling, thoughts, and patterns to help organizations make informed technology choices and resolve common pain points. CNOE will enable organizations to navigate tooling sprawl and technology churn by coordinating contributions, offering tools, and providing neutral and unbiased guidance on technology choices to deliver internal developer platforms.

Developer productivity is increasingly important for organizations to compete in today’s fast-paced marketplace. To increase productivity, many organizations are taking a platform engineering approach to build internal developer platforms that abstract away complexity and enable faster, more secure software delivery. These internal developer platforms are long-term strategic investments, and the choice of open source technologies and architectures used to build these platforms can greatly impact their long-term success and viability.

CNOE is a community for organizations passionate about evolving experiences in developer productivity and efficiency. Contributors to this community are sharing their open source developer platform tooling choices to bring awareness to the best practices that have helped their respective teams. With such awareness comes alignment and the ability to de-risk their technology choices over the long term.

The CNOE community will navigate their operational technology decisions together, coordinate contributions, and offer guidance on which Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technologies to use to achieve cloud efficiencies. CNOE will aim to:

• Create an open source first strategy for internal developer platform capabilities, prioritizing CNCF technologies.
• Build community alignment on technology choices and best practices.
• Elevate tools and practices that can benefit a wide range of organizations building their own internal developer platforms.
• Build for the infrastructure and customize to developer needs, making the solutions and patterns flexible for adoption.
• Provide artifacts about tools, patterns, and practices to be easily consumable by the community.

“The work of building secure, reliable, compliant, and regionalized software is becoming more and more complicated. Development teams need the right separation of concerns to build efficiently and move fast. Internal developer platforms enable just that. They abstract away complexity so a team can focus fully on their key goals. I’m excited to see the CNOE community share experiences, expand ideas beyond a single company’s viewpoint, and de-risk our technology strategies to build better together.” – Ben Cochran, VP Developer Enablement at Autodesk

“As a technology company, CNOE is an extension of our DNA, and open source is key to our platform. CNOE fosters collaboration within the industry, minimizes duplicated work, and emphasizes unique products. I’m eager to see our contributions to CNOE and others benefiting from it.” – Chris Lyon, VP of Engineering Segment at Twilio.

“Open source software is a core component that many organizations leverage to power their internal developer platforms. Organizations often anchor on specific capabilities to power their developer platforms like Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure as Code, Service Mesh, Policy controls, Artifact management, and developer portals. As a result, they have been seeking a forum to share best practices and to share their findings on the tooling choices they have been using. I’m incredibly excited to see AWS contribute to CNOE and CNOE be the vehicle that creates industry alignment based on the intrinsic gravity of the tooling choices being made at scale.” – Paul Roberts, Sr. Principal Solutions Architect at AWS.

“Adobe believes in the transformative power of open source software.  We are excited to be a founding member of CNOE and to partner with other industry thought leaders to define and share our vision of a cloud native stack for rapidly building Internal Developer Platforms.” – Dave Weinstein, VP of Engineering at Adobe.

“Salesforce is deeply engaged in the Open Source community, which was integral in building Hyperforce, a reimagination of our trusted platform architecture for the public cloud. Salesforce is honored to serve as a launch partner for CNOE, further advancing the adoption of open source technologies and assuring companies of sound technology decisions and sustained support for years to come.” – Josh Meier, Hyperforce Lead Architect

With the launch of CNOE, members will contribute tooling, plugins, and reference implementations that facilitate building internal developer platforms. Members are also releasing a capability map that captures key open technologies and their relevance in building internal developer platforms across these organizations.

As we move forward, each member organization will continue to share their approach on adopting and composing the tooling and technologies recommended by the CNOE working group to deliver on their IDPs.

CNOE invites more companies to join us. To learn more about CNOE, visit https://cnoe.io, where we share extended details about patterns and practices we are developing. Explore options to get involved and contact us via the CNCF slack channel #cnoe-public.