The CNF Certification program provides a way for open and closed source network functions (ie applications providing networking functionality) to demonstrate their adoption of cloud native best practices with the help of a open source testing framework called the CNF Test Suite. The certification program is a living thing. The CNCF community, including the Cloud Native Network Function Working Group, and the CNF Test Suite team work together in defining and overseeing what it means to be a cloud native certified telco application (eg. CNF). Work on the mechanics of the certification tests occurs in the CNF Test Suite.
With such a wide array of applications being developed today, workload certification tests help ensure that developers can follow cloud native best practices when building greenfield applications and/or modernizing existing applications. A certified application provides the following benefits:
Interoperability: Make it easier for applications to work well with other applications and the cloud platforms they run on
Shared experience: Build upon the work of the community through the adoption of cloud native best practices
Predictability: Certified applications act in a predictable manner when running on cloud native infrastructure like Kubernetes. Unexpected behavior should be rare because application specific issues are weeded out during the best practice testing.
Timely updates: To remain certified, vendors need to certify with new releases of their product and pass new certification tests yearly, or more frequently, so you can be sure that the products are following the best practices adopted by the cloud native community.
Confirmability: Any end user can confirm that an application remains compliant to cloud native practices by running the identical open source certification application (CNF Test Suite) that was used to certify.
Implementing and running applications in a cloud native manner will enable you to more fully benefit from the advantages of cloud native infrastructure.
To participate and contribute to the program itself (including discussion of issues affecting certification), join the mailing list and slack channel. Details: CNF WG.
To contribute to or use the test suite you can join the slack channel, weekly meetings, and interact in GitHub. Details: CNF Test Suite.
To quickly get the CNF Test Suite up and running, see the Quick Installation Guide.