Keynote: Gardens and Glaciers: Saving Knowledge Through Succession

The importance of succession planning and knowledge transfer in Cloud native projects

• Cloud native projects are experiencing turnover and external factors that impact the community and bring innovation, but also strain and change on projects
• Maintainers and contributors may experience burnout and imposter syndrome, making succession planning and knowledge transfer crucial
• Scaling knowledge glaciers and distributing knowledge through documentation, community engagement, and contribution is key
• Establishing trust within the community and contributing back to the project helps with succession planning and ensures diversity and innovation in the project
• Designing communities into layers of leadership, including canopies of maintainers, sub canopies of technical leads, and ground cover of new contributions, is important for year-round blooms and successive plantings

When a garden is a monoculture, meaning only one kind of plant exists, it becomes more susceptible to plague and disease. It's more likely to be attacked, it's more likely to wither and fail because the lack of diversity which provides the defense in depth is so important and we only get that in polyculture environments.

Founded in 2015, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is designed to empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. In the past 8 years, we’ve seen technical innovation in cloud native garden grow by leaps and bounds. However, with each technical innovation we compact the depths of knowledge that were necessary for that innovation to occur. Kubernetes exists to orchestrate containerized workloads, we use a service mesh like Linkerd or Istio to simplify and secure communications between containerized microservices. Every project in the landscape is designed to create a layer or layers of abstraction to simplify the complexity in cloud native architectures. When compacted and concentrated this information forms knowledge glaciers — an accumulation and compaction of deep knowledge built over time that provides foundational understanding as community knowledge expands. Unless we take steps to preserve and transfer information, the more knowledge we lose with each generation of technologists as those lessons learned (like surviving day two operations) are lost to history. This emphasizes the importance in active succession planning and building-the-bench of community leaders and maintainers. We need to dedicate time to save the glaciers, transfer institutional and technical knowledge within the ecosystem, plant the seeds of tomorrow’s leaders, and make room for our community to grow and bloom.