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Amazon Web Services joins Microsoft at CNCF

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 15 Aug 2017

AWS's move comes on the heels of Microsoft joining the CNCF as a platinum member last month.

AWS hopes its move will help to accelerate the development and deployment of cloud native technologies in its industry-leading public cloud, said Adrian Cockcroft, Vice President of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, who will join CNCF's governing board.

According to Dan Kohn, executive director of the CNCF, with Microsoft and AWS as members, CNCF can now boast all of the five largest public cloud providers as active members.

Kohn said CNCF served as the neutral home for collaboration and brings together the industry's top developers, end users and vendors - including the five largest public cloud providers and many of the leading private cloud companies.

"Also on our governing board are most of the world's biggest private cloud vendors. The combined industry momentum behind CNCF signals not only the value of Kubernetes and our other cloud native technologies, but also underlines the foundation's commitment to making these technologies ubiquitous," he added.

Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimise resource utilisation. The CNCF hosts critical components of those software stacks including Kubernetes, Fluentd, linkerd, Prometheus, OpenTracing, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt and CNI.

According to a recent survey, 63% of respondents run containers on AWS, up from 44% a year ago.

"Many CNCF projects already run in the AWS Cloud, and we are excited to join the foundation to ensure that customers continue to have a great experience running these workloads on AWS," AWS's Cockcroft said.

"CNCF provides a neutral home for open source projects like Kubernetes, containerd, CNI, and linkerd. With our membership, we look forward to growing our role in these communities and the overall cloud native ecosystem."

Kohn said that as the largest cloud provider, AWS brought years of experience in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing and enormous expertise in cloud native technologies.

"We believe that AWS's participation will help shape the future of enterprise computing," he said and added that Kubernetes - an open-source platform designed to automate deploying, scaling and operating application containers, and containers generally - were rapidly displacing virtualisation as the go-to software deployment model.

Cockcroft said Amazon had made numerous contributions to many open source projects over the years. These had included Linux kernel, Docker, Apache Hive, Apache Hadoop, Chromium, jQuery, OpenMPI, and Apache MXNet. Amazon joined the Linux Foundation in 2013, is a founding member of the Core Infrastructure Initiative. The company also contributes to several other Linux Foundation projects, including the Xen Project, Open Container Initiative, and the TODO Group.

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