Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces New Members, Begins Accepting Technical Contributions

Broad set of stakeholders join effort

SAN FRANCISCO – December 17, 2015 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and organization dedicated to advancing the development of cloud native applications and services, today announced new members from across the industry, its formal open governance structure and new details about its technology stack.

The intent to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) was announced earlier this year at OSCON to support development in a cloud native environment. Cloud native applications are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and microservices-oriented. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation focuses on development of open source technologies, reference architectures and common format for Cloud native applications or services. This work provides the necessary infrastructure for Internet companies and enterprises to scale their businesses.

Today this work is resource intensive, requiring companies to assemble a team of experts that can integrate disparate technologies and maintain all of them. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation seeks to improve the overall developer experience, paving the way for faster code reuse, improved machine efficiency, reduced costs and increases in the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

Companies from across the industry are coming together to formally invest in this work. The full roster of founding and new member organizations committed to CNCF include: Apcera, Apprenda, AT&T, Box, Centrify, Cisco, Cloudsoft, ClusterHQ, Container Solutions, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Datawise.io, Deis, Inc./Engine Yard, Docker, eBay, Eldarion, Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, iguaz.io, Infoblox, Intel, ISHI Systems, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Metaswitch Networks (Project Calico), NCSOFT, NEC, NetApp, NGINX, Odin, Portworx, Rancher Labs, Red Hat, RX-M, LLC, Scalock, Software Engineering Lab of Zhejiang University, Switch SUPERNAP, Sysdig, Twistlock, Twitter, Univa Corporation, VMware, Weaveworks and Williams Garcia.

“As cloud computing matures, we’re finding there are a variety of ways to approach application development in this environment. Among some of the world’s largest users, such as Google and Facebook, cloud native development allows unprecedented scale and efficiency,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “With the level of investment from across the industry and technical contributions from some of the developer community’s best talent, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is poised to advance the state of the art of application development at Internet scale.”

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation today is also announcing its ratified open governance structure. The model includes a Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) that will direct technical decisions, oversee working group projects and manage contributions to the code base. The nominations are currently open for TOC members and we encourage everyone to get involved; see the cncf-toc mailing list for more information. There is also an End User Advisory Board and Board of Directors to guide business decisions and ensure alignment between the technical and end user communities.

Technical contributions are open to anyone and are being submitted now to the Technical Oversight Committee for review. Expected contributions include Kubernetes and etcd, a distributed consistent key-value store for shared configuration and service discovery. Additionally, Intel and Switch are preparing a large compute farm to be used for advancing CNCF technologies. This infrastructure will be used to run multiple scalability and performance tests and deploy various software stacks easily and at scale. The Foundation aims to provide a neutral home for any technologies that support an open and interoperable stack for cloud native computing.

The Foundation is looking at open source at the orchestration level, followed by the integration of hosts and services by defining APIs and standards through a code first approach to advance the state-of-art of container-packaged application infrastructure. The organization is also working with other Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, such as the Open Container Initiative, which is establishing the industry standard for container image specification and runtime, and the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

For more information about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, please visit: https://cncf.io/

Comments from Platinum Members

Cisco
“Cloud Native is rapidly becoming the defacto devops model. In addition, the open source developer community is taking the lead role in enabling application life-cycle management, tooling and development. In the journey to cloud native, an industry community is a very important step. The CNCF aligns with Cisco’s vision of application-centric enablement and portability across public and private clouds. We’re pleased to be contributors to CNCF as it enables Cisco to collaborate directly with the entire cloud native community and create a set of common services and definitions that will drive innovation in the industry.”
Ken Owens, CTO Cloud Solutions, Cisco Systems

CoreOs
“CNCF is incremental to guiding and moving the industry forward. As a platinum member, CoreOS is looking forward to working together with the cloud native industry leaders to continue innovating so the world can be successful with running and managing container-enabled infrastructure. We intend to donate key open source projects to the foundation as part of our commitment in working together in a vendor neutral way so that we as an industry can provide the benefits of cloud native computing to all.”
Alex Polvi, CEO, CoreOS

Docker
“Built on the foundation of the Open Container Initiative, image format and runtime industry standard, the CNCF addresses the needs of developers seeking options at the orchestration layer of the stack. Because there are many competing solutions and no established standards, the CNCF framework encourages collaboration on interoperable references stacks for container orchestration such as the Docker Swarm integration with Mesos announced earlier this year. The formation of a governance model encourages contributions and further collaboration, providing developers with the resources they need to more rapidly move Dockerized applications into production.”
Patrick Chanezon, Chief Developer Advocate, Docker

Google
“Google is committed to open software initiatives, and to helping enterprises everywhere benefit from cloud native computing. In addition to the contribution of projects like Kubernetes to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we look forward to bringing over a decade of experience running cloud native systems at internet scale to this new community.”
Craig McLuckie, Group Product Manager, Google

Huawei
“Nowadays, there are many technologies driving the cloud-native trend and making computing, networking and storage more scalable and manageable. In Huawei, we have been leading and innovating in building large scale, heterogeneous cloud infrastructures, and open source technologies are important ingredients to this. With the forming of CNCF, we are happy to see a great home to host, incorporate and integrate these technologies to construct a common framework without losing flexibility and efficiency. And we believe this, along with the ecosystem arisen from it, will bring significant value to our customers and the industry.”
Mr. Ti Gong, the President of Central Software Institute at Huawei

IBM
“As a founding member, IBM’s support of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation demonstrates our ongoing commitment to developing next generation cloud native applications based in open source and open standards. These new investments and the open governance model are key to ensuring containers and other open technologies are smart long-term solutions aligned to deliver value through our Bluemix infrastructure.”  
Dr. Angel Diaz, IBM vice president of Cloud Architecture and Technology

Intel
“Creating focus on cloud native application development to address strategic business workloads offers enormous opportunity for the enterprise. Intel is committed to working with industry leaders and emerging technologies within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to enable the rapid delivery of open, efficient, and optimized cloud-native applications.”
Jonathan Donaldson, Vice President of Software Defined Infrastructure, Intel

Joyent
“Joyent is excited to serve a central role in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, as it embodies the belief that we have had for nearly a decade: that the future of computing is container-packaged, elastic, and service-oriented.  We believe that the CNCF is particularly timely, as technologists today are feeling overwhelmed by the explosion of container-related technologies. The opportunity for the CNCF is to help bring clarity and interoperability to cloud native computing — to serve the next generation of computing the same way that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) famously facilitated our modern internet.”  
Bryan Cantrill, CTO, Joyent

Mesosphere
“Mesosphere is excited to be a platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, alongside a group of other truly innovative companies. Building and running microservices using container-based architectures is extremely important to customers of our Datacenter Operating System. The CNCF will help ensure there are always high-quality open-source options available.”
Florian Leibert, co-founder and CEO, Mesosphere

Red Hat
“Next generation applications are architected as fine-grained, distributed components and services, deployed in Linux containers, and hosted in clouds. This industry-wide shift in application development and delivery requires new tools, processes, and infrastructure. Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is pleased to bring our deep experience building cloud-native application infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Atomic and OpenShift to CNCF. To help accelerate this transformation, we are excited to work with our industry partners and end users in CNCF to define clear layers and support technologies such as Kubernetes and Open Container Format to build this next generation of application infrastructure.”
Chris Wright, Vice President and Chief Technologist, Office of Technology at Red Hat

Switch SUPERNAP
“Switch SUPERNAP is focused on ensuring that modern technology solutions meet the needs of today’s enterprises. Not only is Switch housing the Foundation’s Intel cluster, but we’re delighted to be involved with the other partners to enable scalable, functional and adaptive platforms to support cloud native applications.”
Jason Mendenhall, Executive Vice President of Cloud at Switch

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. For more information on Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, visit http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

###

The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.