Reference architectures
A growing catalog of real-world cloud native architectures contributed by CNCF end users. Browse by organization, industry, and the CNCF projects used in each architecture.
Why submit a reference architecture?
Showcase your brand's engineering
Put your production work in front of the whole cloud native community — shared architectures have helped earn organizations the Top End User Award. You've already done the work — take your victory lap.
Get expert review
Every submission is reviewed by the End User TAB and your peers, giving your design vetted, independent feedback. Hundreds of collective years of production experience lead to cheaper prototyping.
Guide the projects you rely on
Real adoption patterns show maintainers how their projects are used in production and help shape roadmaps around end user needs. The more you participate, the more you influence — move the needle on the projects your business depends on.
Help the next adopter
A decade of shared knowledge has led to the immense scale of cloud native. Your trade-offs and lessons learned become a practical map for teams facing the same decisions — a contribution no code can replace. Take the lessons of your peers back to your platform teams and continue the circle of open source.
Organizations with community-accepted Reference Architectures are automatically eligible for the End User Contributor program free of charge.
Benefits for your Organization
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Keynote time
Tell your data-driven story from the biggest stage in open source — the community celebrates its end users in front of thousands of practitioners.
Complimentary KubeCon passes
Bring the engineers behind your architecture to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to meet the maintainers and peers they work alongside. Celebrate our collective operational successes, learn from the failures.
End User track talk selection
Coming soon: special consideration for production-grade stories to share with the community.
CNCF marketing support
Celebrate your brand's success with full support from the CNCF Marketing team, backed by the Linux Foundation's global events.
Ready to share yours? Follow the reference architecture submission process or start with the submission issue template.
The catalog
7 real-world architecture reports from CNCF end users.
Software · Digital Media · Digital Experience
Adobe
Scaling Adobe’s Service Delivery Foundation with a Cell-based Architecture
Security, Compliance, Support and Cost Efficiency are cross-cutting concerns for both infrastructure and developer experience.
Reference architecture
Allianz Direct
Enabling Allianz Direct's scaling through Platform Engineering
The PE team is internally organised in DDOs - Distributed DevOps, where each ddo owns a Domain. This setup follows the reverse Conway manoeuver where the reference architecture structure dictates the teams setup. The PE team consist of 13 m
Research · Public Sector
CERN
A Cloud Native Scientific Computing Platform for CERN NextGen AI
Some additional projects outside the CNCF are essential to this deployment. [MLFlow](https://mlflow.org/), a project under the Linux Foundation used for model management and versioning [Nvidia GPU operator](https://github.com/NVIDIA/gpu-ope
E-commerce · Retail · Digital Commerce
Flipkart Internet Pvt. Ltd.
From Afterthought to Practice: Flipkart’s Multi-Tenant Chaos Engineering Platform on LitmusChaos
Flipkart is one of India’s leading digital commerce companies, running hundreds of tightly coupled microservices across Kubernetes and VM workloads that must withstand the traffic surges of Big Billion Days and other festive sales. The Cent
Communication · Telecommunication
Swisscom (Switzerland) Ltd
End-to-End Cloud Native Telco Platform Automation at Swisscom
Swisscom has built a cloud native telco platform for the end-to-end automation of its 5G standalone core network and cross-domain resource orchestration. The architecture replaces traditional imperative network management (Jenkins pipelines
Communication · Telecommunication · Software · Cloud
Swisscom (Switzerland) Ltd
A modern and sovereign Private Cloud «Kubernetes Service» for Swiss-based enterprises.
Our next generation Private Cloud Container as a Service offering «Kubernetes Service» for the B2B market addresses customer’s need for scalable and highly available Kubernetes workload as a flexible and secure IT foundation. It is part of
Reference architecture
ZEISS
ZEISS Vision Care - Order Fulfillment
Our Business Enablement & IT team develops, designs, and operates the order fulfillment platform that underpins this process.
About this catalog
Architecture content is imported from the CNCF Cloud Native Reference Architecture project. Each architecture includes its source revision and attribution. Documentation is distributed under CC BY 4.0.