The Practices That Made Me Go 'Wow': What Every CNCF Project Ca... Rohit Agrawal & Kateryna Nezdolii

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The Practices That Made Me Go 'Wow': What Every CNCF Project Can Learn From Envoy - Rohit Agrawal, Databricks & Kateryna Nezdolii, Isovalent

When we became Envoy maintainers, we expected a codebase. What we found was literally a masterclass in sustainable open source engineering. From an automated system to track deprecation and tags PR authors two release later, to CI pipelines running all the builds including memory & address sanitizers and continuous fuzzing via OSS-Fuzz, Envoy has institutionalized practices that prevent the entropy every large project faces.

This talk shares the practices that genuinely surprised me as a new maintainer. Every practice we'll cover is adoptable by any project including the runtime feature guards with built-in deprecation timelines, automated GitHub issue creation for cleanup tasks, test ownership models that scale, and CI health strategies that keep a 2M+ line codebase green. Moreover the policies around reviews, code ownership, etc. are beyond impressive.

You'll leave with concrete practices to reduce maintainer burden, improve backward compatibility, no matter your project's size.