August 10, 2017

AWS joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The move comes amid growing industry rumors of AWS launching a new Kubernetes based container service.

Consulting firm

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has today announced that Amazon’s cloud computing platform AWS has been inducted into the CNCF. AWS joins the foundation in the capacity of a platinum member, aiming to advance and deploy new cloud native container technologies. As part of the membership, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, Adrian Cockcroft, will be granted a position on the CNCF’s governing board.

Industry analysts view Amazon’s decision to join the CNCF at the highest level as an unofficial strategic partnership between AWS and Kubernetes, the Google-developed open-source container platform that manages containerized software environments. Results from a recent survey show that 63% of respondents currently run Kubernetes containers on AWS, up from 44% in the previous year. With the CNCF presiding over the Kubernetes Project, AWS will now commit to spending more time and resources towards the evolution of the project, as well as on several smaller operations that aim to simplify and improve the Kubernetes platform. AWS has already been an early contributor to Containerd, the CNCF industry-standard container runtime.

While announcing AWS’s membership, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, Adrian Cockcroft, stated:

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. 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.

Meanwhile, Executive Director of the CNCF, Dan Kohn, welcomed AWS to the foundation:

As the largest cloud provider, AWS brings years of experience in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing and enormous expertise in cloud native technologies. We are honored to have AWS join CNCF as a platinum member, and believe that their participation will help shape the future of enterprise computing.

Following this development, most of the major public cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google and IBM, now possess varying levels of memberships in the CNCF.