Gardener Enhancements

This repository contains Gardener Enhancement Proposals (GEPs) - design and proposal documents for changes that are relevant at the project-wide level and require discussion and decision-making in Gardener's Product Steering Committee (PSC) and/or Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

The structure and intent of this repository are inspired by kubernetes/enhancements.

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📌 What Is a Gardener Enhancement?

A Gardener Enhancement is a proposal that meets the criteria for being discussed in Gardener's steering meetings. These proposals typically cover strategic, cross-cutting, high-impact, or high-risk topics affecting the Gardener project as a whole.

Examples include:

• Major new features or architectural changes
• Significant changes to APIs or core behavior
• Topics with notable cross-team or ecosystem impact
• Initiatives requiring substantial development investment
• Proposals with elevated technical or operational risk

If a topic qualifies for Product Steering or Technical Steering, it belongs in this repository and must follow the GEP process and template.

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🚫 Out of Scope

This repository does not host:

• Subproject-internal design documents
• Proposals that only affect a single Gardener subproject (e.g., MCM, etcd-druid) and do not meet steering criteria

Subprojects are free to maintain their own project-scoped proposal or design documents as long as the topic does not require steering-level discussion.
If it does, it must be submitted here as a GEP and presented in the relevant steering meeting.

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🧭 Steering Committees

Gardener has two steering bodies:

• Product Steering Committee (PSC)
  Focuses on strategy, vision, prioritization, and roadmap alignment.
  Discusses topics at an early stage, answering the “Why / Whether” question.

• Technical Steering Committee (TSC)
  Focuses on architecture, technical direction, and design decisions.
  Discusses topics at a later stage, answering the “How” question.

Detailed information, criteria, and meeting processes can be found here:
👉 https://gardener.cloud/community/steering/

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✅ Does My Topic Need a GEP?

A topic typically requires a GEP if it meets any of the following:

• Requires significant development effort (≈ 6+ person-months)
• Has relevant cross-team impact
• Significantly impacts Gardener users or ecosystem
• Introduces high technical or operational risk

If unsure, reach out to a steering committee member for guidance.

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📝 How to Propose a Gardener Enhancement

Important

Please read through https://gardener.cloud/community/steering first.

1. Determine the target committee

   • Product Steering (PSC) or Technical Steering (TSC)

2. Create a new issue

   • https://github.com/gardener/enhancements/issues/new?template=enhancement.md

3. Create a new proposal file

   • Copy the template from: https://github.com/gardener/enhancements/tree/master/geps/NNNN-gep-template
   • Name it descriptively, e.g. <issue-number>-node-specific-etcd-certificates.md

4. Add supporting assets (optional)

   • Diagrams, slides, etc. in a matching subfolder

5. Open a Pull Request

   • Read https://gardener.cloud/community/steering/#%F0%9F%93%86-what-happens-after-opening-a-pr to learn what happens after opening the PR.