I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to build an open source foundation from scratch the last couple of years by serving as the founding executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation[1] (CNCF). Since late 2015, the foundation has grown to comprise more than 200 members worldwide and 18 innovative cloud-native projects. Also, for the first time, we recently published an annual report[2] representing what our community accomplished in 2017.
What has been interesting about this experience is that more people know about our projects, such as Kubernetes[3], Envoy[4], and Prometheus[5], than know about the open source foundation behind them. The goal of this article is to explain exactly what the purpose of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is and how we support our community of cloud-native open infrastructure projects.
Home of Kubernetes and Cloud Native
The original seed project for CNCF was Kubernetes, as orchestration is a critical piece of moving toward a cloud-native infrastructure. As many people know, Kubernetes is one of the highest-velocity[6] open source projects of all time and is sometimes affectionately referred to as “Linux of the Cloud.” Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration system, with more than 50 certified Kubernetes[7] solutions and supported by the top cloud providers in the world. Furthermore, CNCF is the first open source foundation to count the top 10 cloud providers in the world as members.
However, CNCF is intended to be more than just a home for Kubernetes, as the cloud-native and open infrastructure movement encompasses more than just orchestration.
A community of open infrastructure projects
CNCF has a community of independently governed projects[8]; as