Call For Proposals (CFP)

Join key customers, project leads, and contributors that make up the gRPC ecosystem for a full day of talks, demos, case studies, and code labs. Experts will discuss real-world implementations of gRPC, best practices for developers, and topic expert deep dives. This is a must-attend event for those using gRPC in their applications today, as well as those considering gRPC for their enterprise microservices.

There will be ample time for meeting project leads, networking with peers, and Q+A.

For any questions regarding the CFP process, please email cfp@cncf.io.

Please be aware that the Linux Foundation will now utilize Sessionize for CFP submissions. Sessionize is a cloud-based event content management software designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. If you need guidance, please review how to submit your session for an event to see step-by-step instructions and helpful screenshots.

• gRPC in-production
• User Stories + Case Studies
• Implementation
• Ecosystem + Tooling
• Codelabs

• Solo Presentation: 30 minutes, 1 speaker presenting on a topic
• Dual Presentation: 30 minutes, 2 speakers presenting on a topic
• Panel Discussion: 30 minutes of discussion amongst 3 to 5 speakers

• All speakers are required to adhere to our code of conduct. We also highly recommend that speakers take our online Inclusive Speaker Orientation Course.
• Panel submissions must include the names of all participants in the initial submission to be considered. In an effort to promote speaker diversity, CNCF does not accept submissions with all-male panels, and speakers must not all be from the same company.
• Complimentary Passes For Speakers – One complimentary pass for the event will be provided for each accepted speaker.
• Avoid sales or marketing pitches and discussing unlicensed or potentially closed-source technologies when preparing your proposal; these talks are almost always rejected due to the fact that they take away from the integrity of our events, and are rarely well-received by conference attendees.
• CNCF will not select submissions that have already been presented at a previous Linux Foundation event within the past year. If your submission is similar to a previous talk, please explain how this version differs.
• You are allowed to be listed as a speaker on a maximum of two proposals submitted to the CFP, regardless of the format. If you are listed on more than two, we will contact you to remove yourself from any additional proposals.
• You may only be selected to speak on one panel and one non-panel session per event.
• All accepted speakers are required to submit their slides prior to the event.

While it is not our intention to provide you with strict instructions on how to prepare your proposal, we hope you will take a moment to review the following guidelines that we have put together to help you prepare the best submission possible. To get started, here are three things that you should consider before submitting your proposal:

1. What are you hoping to get from your presentation?
2. What do you expect the audience to gain from your presentation?
3. How will your presentation help better the ecosystem?

There are plenty of ways to give a presentation about projects and technologies without focusing on company-specific efforts. Remember the things to consider that we mentioned above when writing your proposal and think of ways to make it interesting for attendees while still letting you share your experiences, educate the community about an issue, or generate interest in a project.

Writing Your Proposal

Your session title will be the main point of reference for attendees to decide if they want to attend your talk, so choose it carefully. The title should accurately reflect the content of your talk and comply with The Linux Foundation’s Inclusive Language Initiative. Please use title case when inputting your title.

In the session description, make the most of your opportunity to pitch your talk to the program committee by emphasizing its problem, contribution, and relevance. Don’t forget technical details, but keep the big picture in mind. Your proposal’s description should be focused, detailed, and comply with The Linux Foundation’s Inclusive Language Initiative. It will appear on the website schedule if accepted, so ensure it’s error-free, uses full sentences, and written in the third person. This description can make or break an attendee’s decision to attend your talk, so provide enough information to aid their choice, and be concise. The competition for presentation slots is high, so a well-crafted, engaging abstract will improve your chances of acceptance.

Use this opportunity to elaborate on why your presentation is important and why attendees should care. Explain how your content will benefit the ecosystem or share any other relevant information with the co-chairs and program committee. We understand that this can be a challenging question to answer, but like the abstract, the relevance of your presentation is crucial, and it’s as significant as the content in determining acceptance.

Please indicate whether your submission is a case study. In other words, is your submission a report of an organization’s implementation of something, such as a practice, a product, a system, a service, or combination thereof? The case study can be thought of as a real-world test of how the implementation works, and how well it works.

If you have presented this talk before within the past year at a CNCF or Linux Foundation event, please explain the significant differences between that presentation and the one you are proposing in your session description.

Please list all CNCF-hosted graduated, incubating, or sandbox software(s) as well as all open source projects that your presentation will be focused on if applicable.

Since the Program Committee reviews numerous proposals, additional resources can assist in assessing a speaker’s proficiency and presentation skills. Please provide a video or audio recording of a previous talk you have given. If you do not have any prior recordings of your talk, you may create a brief YouTube video of yourself speaking for a few minutes.

How to Give a Great Talk

We want to make sure submitters receive resources to help put together a great submission and if accepted, give the best presentation possible. To help with this, we recommend viewing seasoned speaker Dawn Foster’s in-depth talk: Getting Over Your Imposter Syndrome to Become a Conference Speaker – Dawn Foster, VMware

Have More Questions? First Time Submitting? Don’t Feel Intimidated

CNCF events are an excellent way to get to know the community and share your ideas and the work that you are doing and we strongly encourage first-time speakers to submit talks for our events. In the instance that you aren’t sure about your abstract, reach out to us and we will be more than happy to work with you on your proposal.

First time using Sessionize?

Sessionize is a cloud-based event content management software designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. If you need guidance, please review how to submit your session for an event to see step-by-step instructions and helpful screenshots.

Submitting on behalf of somebody else?

While speakers ordinarily submit their sessions themselves, it’s also common for them to have someone else do it in their name. Submitters can choose to submit as someone else and must fill out the necessary speaker fields, but the session submission process is otherwise identical to when the session is submitted by the speaker themselves.

Example title

OCI, CRI, ??: Making Sense of the Container Runtime Landscape in Kubernetes

Example Description

You’ve probably heard about the OCI—a standardization effort to share a common definition for container runtime, image, and image distribution. Add to that the CRI (container runtime interface) in Kubernetes—designed to abstract the container runtime from the kubelet—and you may start to wonder what all these standards and interfaces mean for you in a Kubernetes world.

As of this year, a long list of runtimes, including CNCF projects containerd and cri-o, all implement the CRI. But did you know there are quite a few others? The unique number of CRI combinations is growing, all of which use the common OCI definitions for runtime and image interoperability.

But how would you decide which container runtime is right for you? Clearly each one has tradeoffs. This talk will help describe the current landscape and give you details on the why and how of each CRI implementation available today.

Example Benefits to the ecosystem

It is a repeating comment across the CNCF ecosystem that the number of choices for container runtime is confusing, especially for those who are newer to our ecosystem. Even for those who many have heard the names–Docker, containerd, cri-o–even they are curious as to the reasons why there are many varied runtimes available to implement the CRI interface for Kubernetes, and what is the history that brought us to this point.

This talk helps bring clarity to the container runtime landscape, and especially shows the interesting work being done in additional isolation technologies like gVisor, AWS Firecracker, and Kata containers and why that may be of value to consider for certain security or workload constraints.

In the end, especially as we have two major runtimes as CNCF projects, this talk hopefully brings a level of insight to practitioners, developers, and operators as to why clusters may choose various runtimes and how new features in Kubernetes like RuntimeClass are making it easier to support mixed clusters that can support the needs of workloads with different isolation features or requirements.

CNCF and its project communities are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for participants at our events. All submitters are required to abide by our Code of Conduct.

If you have any questions regarding the CFP process, please contact us at cfp@cncf.io.