Purpose

The Open Home Foundation Engineering Standards define the technologies and practices that the Infrastructure (INFRA) Working Group requires for any service that the INFRA team deploys, operates, or supports. These standards also provide optional but strongly recommended guidance for engineering teams across the foundation to promote cross-team consistency, shared operational understanding, and ease of collaboration.

While this document contains engineering best practices that extend beyond pure infrastructure topics, its mandatory scope applies only to services under INFRA's responsibility. Other teams may adopt these standards voluntarily to improve consistency.

Why do we need this?

The adoption of a standardized technology stack is crucial for preventing fragmentation and over-reliance on individual experts ("one-person services"), thereby enhancing long-term maintainability. When teams choose specialized or niche tools, essential knowledge becomes concentrated, infrastructure struggles to reuse shared pipelines or observability tools, and managing incidents or upgrades becomes a slow, customized process.

By using a well-supported, standard toolkit, any Open Home Foundation engineer can contribute to various services with minimal training and setup. This strategy reduces cognitive load, accelerates onboarding for new team members, enables the INFRA team to establish consistent deployments and monitoring, and lowers overall operational risk without compromising flexibility in critical areas.