The Cloud Native Computing Forum (CNCF) has cast its net beyond its core constituency of infrastructure developers with the launch of an Application Delivery Special Interest Group.

The application delivery special interest group takes its place in the CNCF lineup alongside the existing security and storage SIGs. Weaveworks’ Alexis Richardson and Microsoft’s Michelle Noorali will serve as the TOC liaisons, and Alois Reitbauer, Bryan Liles and Lei Zhang have been elected as co-chairs. 

The avowed aim of the Application Delivery SIG is to “develop best practices, foster collaboration between projects, improve tool interoperability and propose new initiatives and projects.”

Naturally this presupposes the applications in question are cloud native, and “it will engage primarily with CNCF projects in the application management space, including “Brigade, Buildpacks, CloudEvents, Flux, Helm and Kubernetes.”

The mission is further fleshed out on the GitHub page for the SIG, which lists collaboration on areas related to developing, distributing, deploying, managing and operating secure cloud-native applications and delivering them in a cloud native manner. Also on the to do list are developing information and other resources for the community, and identifying suitable projects and gaps in the landscape.

It is also quite clear what areas are out of scope for the group. Non-cloud native applications are a non-brainer, but the no go list also includes testing, developer tools which are “not closely related to delivering application to cloud”, and “specific programme model or developing framework”. It will also not be delving into the definition of standards for components like container images or other infrastructure-level cloud cloud native app building blocks.

The first order of business for the SIG is produce a white paper explaining Cloud Native Applications, and the current state of the art. This will then form the groundwork for creating an applications delivery landscape to educate users and reduce confusion. Next up will be defining and standardizing generic rollout models covering “typical app delivery patterns with concrete use cases and practices”. Just in case you were wondering what this means, the GitHub page lists Blue-Green Deployment, A/B Testing, Canary Deployment and Analysis, Progressive Traffic Shifting and GitOps.