This directory contains CFP design proposals for features impacting repos across the Cilium Github organization.

Purpose of CFPs

The purpose of a Cilium Feature Proposal (CFP) is to allow community members to gain feedback on their designs from the Committers before the community member commits to executing on the design. By going through the design process, developers gain a high level of confidence that their designs are viable and will be accepted.

NOTE: This process is not mandatory. Anyone can execute on their own design without going through this process and submit code to the respective repos. However, depending on the complexity of the design and how experienced the developer is within the community, they could greatly benefit from going through this design process first. The risk of not getting a design proposal approved is that a developer may not arrive at a viable architecture that the community will accept.

How to create CFPs

To create a CFP, it is recommended to use the CFP-003-template.md file as an outline. The structure of this template is meant to provide a starting point for people. Feel free to edit and modify your outline to best fit your needs when creating a proposal. When are you ready to submit your CFP please:

1. Create a CFP issue in the repo your design applies to if you haven't already
2. Create the file in this repo, with a path of <repo>/CFP-###-subject.md where the number is the CFP issue number

For example, if your issue is filed in https://github.com/cilium/hubble with the issue number 000, and the subject of that CFP is to "Change foo to bar", the path would be hubble/CFP-000-change-foo-to-bar.md.

Many design docs also begin their life as a Google doc or other shareable file for easy commenting and editing when still in the early stages of discussion. Once your proposal is done, submit it as a PR to the design-cfps folder.

If you want to bring further attention to your design, you may want to raise the design during the weekly community call and on the #development channel in Slack.

Getting a design approved

For a CFP to be considered viable, a Cilium committer needs to aprove it. After the approval, the design can be merged. A merged design proposal means the proposal is viable to be executed on, but not that there is a 100% chance it will be accepted.

Design proposal drift

After a design proposal is merged, it's likely that the actual implementation will begin to drift slightly from the original design. This is expected and there is no expectation that the original design proposal needs to be updated to reflect these differences.

The code and our documentation are the ultimate sources of truth. CFPs are merely the starting point for the implementation.