Kubernetes is the most popular open-source container manager. It’s been officially supported on every cloud platform you’ve ever heard of… with one big exception: Amazon Web Service (AWS). Now, AWS has got on board the Kubernetes bandwagon as well by joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member.
With this move, all five of the largest cloud providers — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and Alibaba Cloud — are CNCF members. Kubernetes has been validated as the DevOps tool for cloud native computing and containers.
Really, it was only a matter of time before AWS joined the CNCF. According to a recent survey, 63 percent of users were already hosting Kubernetes on Amazon EC2. This was up from 44 percent a year ago. Many well-known companies were already running Kubernetes in production on AWS, including CNCF End User Community participants NCSOFT, Ticketmaster, Vevo, and Zalando.
“Many CNCF projects already run in the AWS Cloud,” admitted Adrian Cockcroft, AWS’s VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy. “We are excited to join the Foundation to ensure that customers continue to have a great experience running these workloads on AWS.”
CNCF also provides a neutral home for other open-source container-related projects, such as: Containerd, the standard container runtime; Container Network Interface for Linux containers; and Linkerd, a transparent proxy for container service discovery, routing, and failure handling. Cockcroft added, “With our membership, we look forward to growing our role in these communities and the overall cloud-native ecosystem.”