Feature: Add section in project cards for Reference Architectures

[leecalcote]

The CNCF can empower organizations to build more robust, scalable, and efficient cloud-native systems by providing blueprints for success in the form of Reference Architectures.

Reference architectures offer a blueprint for how to use CNCF projects in real-world scenarios, lowering the barrier to entry for new users and helping promote project deployment / operational best practices.

Composite reference architectures that include more than one CNCF project promotes interoperability between different projects by showcasing how they can be integrated effectively.

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This suggested feature is proposed in context of a larger proposal for a CNCF Hub.

[tegioz]

Hi @leecalcote 👋

TBH I'm not really sure if the landscape is the best place to display this kind of information. Projects' cards are already quite large in some cases, and IMHO we should be careful about new additions to keep it focused and helpful for final users. There might be more CNCF projects interested in having their content featured in the landscape as well, so we need to think about the long term sustainability (and fairness) 😇

In any case, there are some points to keep in mind about this particular case:

• We need to be careful about publishing content that hasn't been reviewed/validated by the corresponding project maintainers, specially in a section named "Reference Architectures" published by the CNCF. I've read in your slides that the intention is that projects' maintainers have the ability to do this eventually, but I don't think we are there yet.

• Projects could not be happy with the "reference architectures" listed in their card for a number of reasons: not up to date, not accurate, not relevant, etc. If this information was populated automatically they may not even be able to "hide" some or all of them.

Regarding the PR related to this issue submitted by @Jougan-0 (#672):

• The landscapes generator tool builds static websites that do not rely on any external APIs to collect information at runtime, and we'd like to keep it that way.

• This tool is used to build a few landscapes within the Linux Foundation, and probably many more externally. This feature probably only would make sense in the context of the CNCF landscape, so we cannot have a UI component making requests that will produce no results in other landscapes.

• Searching by the last component of the repository url may yield non relevant results in some cases, which could lead to other projects complaints (related to the point I mentioned above where projects may not agree with the reference architectures listed in their cards).

Landscape2 provides a mechanism that allows adding custom links that will be featured on the projects' cards. Maybe it could be used by projects interested in displaying one or more architectures in their card. This would be similar to the solution we proposed when we had a similar conversation a few months ago regarding Artifact Hub and visual diagrams for Helm charts.

Hope this helps 🙂

/cc @caniszczyk

P.S.: Interestingly, CNCF Hub was the original name of Artifact Hub, and hub.cncf.io the hostname used to serve it 😉