Today, I referred someone to the CNCF landscape site. They were looking for alternatives to a product, and the CNCF Landscape was useful to aggregate a number of those products under a single category. Exploring the CNCF Landscape again today after first discovering it a few weeks ago, I was again overwhelmed at the number of cloud-native products in the ecosystem.

On the one hand I think the landscape is fantastic as a high level organizing filter for cloud products. If you are looking for observability or orchestration, the landscape will start to filter down the list to a workable number. But then the grunt work remains of evaluating the remaining observability tools. Which ones cost, which ones are easy to install, to maintain, integrate with the things that I have or the things that I need? So ideally we would need to go one or two levels deeper. And that even leaves aside that many of the vendors and products in this list would not agree with the placement and would like to be in more categories.

I think we need a feature, or benefit level list, which presupposes a list of features that are described in uniform ways. That alone would be a ton of work. So I understand why we don’t have it. But I still want it, and I think a lot of cloud-native users would like to have it as well.