CNCF Cloud Native Landscape: The Practical Guide
~6 min read
DevOpscncfcloud-nativekubernetesobservabilityserverlesswebassemblyprovisioning
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Designing systems that prompt AI agents instead of prompting them yourself — automations, worktrees, skills, MCP connectors, subagents, and the state file that makes loops durable.
A deep technical comparison of NetworkPolicy enforcement between eBPF-based CNIs (Cilium) and iptables-based CNIs (Calico). Covers implementation internals, real performance benchmarks at scale, L7 policy trade-offs, migration strategies, and production debugging patterns.
The CNCF Cloud Native Landscape catalogs 1,000+ projects. We ranked every major category using a compound metric: stars × 0.5 + forks × 0.3 + maturity bonus (graduated = 1.0, incubating = 0.7, sandbox = 0.4). Here are the categories that matter for production infrastructure.
The backbone of cloud native. 254K combined stars across the top 5 projects.
| Project | Stars | Status | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes | 121K | Graduated | Container orchestration |
| gRPC | 44K | Graduated | Polyglot RPC framework |
| Istio | 38K | Graduated | Service mesh |
| Envoy | 27K | Graduated | L4/L7 proxy |
| Argo CD | 22K | Incubating | GitOps deployment |
| Linkerd | 11K | Graduated | Lightweight service mesh |
Kubernetes is the de facto OS for the cloud — pod scheduling, horizontal scaling, RBAC, and a vast operator ecosystem. gRPC with Protocol Buffers powers polyglot microservice communication. Istio provides traffic management, mTLS, and canary deployments via sidecar proxies; Linkerd offers 80% of the same benefits at 20% of the operational cost using a Rust micro-proxy. Envoy is the data plane behind both (and many API gateways). Argo CD watches Git repos and reconciles cluster state — the GitOps standard.