Submit a reference architecture
Reference architectures are real production systems documented by the CNCF end users who run them. If your organization operates cloud native technology in production, the community wants to learn from how you did it.
Why submit a reference architecture?
Showcase your brand's engineering
Put your production work in front of the whole cloud native community — shared architectures have helped earn organizations the Top End User Award. You've already done the work — take your victory lap.
Get expert review
Every submission is reviewed by the End User TAB and your peers, giving your design vetted, independent feedback. Hundreds of collective years of production experience lead to cheaper prototyping.
Guide the projects you rely on
Real adoption patterns show maintainers how their projects are used in production and help shape roadmaps around end user needs. The more you participate, the more you influence — move the needle on the projects your business depends on.
Help the next adopter
A decade of shared knowledge has led to the immense scale of cloud native. Your trade-offs and lessons learned become a practical map for teams facing the same decisions — a contribution no code can replace. Take the lessons of your peers back to your platform teams and continue the circle of open source.
Organizations with community-accepted Reference Architectures are automatically eligible for the End User Contributor program free of charge.
Benefits for your Organization
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Keynote time
Tell your data-driven story from the biggest stage in open source — the community celebrates its end users in front of thousands of practitioners.
Complimentary KubeCon passes
Bring the engineers behind your architecture to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to meet the maintainers and peers they work alongside. Celebrate our collective operational successes, learn from the failures.
End User track talk selection
Coming soon: special consideration for production-grade stories to share with the community.
CNCF marketing support
Celebrate your brand's success with full support from the CNCF Marketing team, backed by the Linux Foundation's global events.
Ready to share yours? Submit directly using the in-repo submission issue template, or follow the CNCF TAB reference architecture submission process.
Sharing a production architecture is an end user contribution. To contribute code, documentation, or reviews to a CNCF project itself, start at contribute.cncf.io, the contributor portal.