The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is an organization that was founded in December 2015 as part of the Linux Foundation. It works to drive adoption of cloud native technologies by fostering an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. Cloud native technologies and practices are designed to help companies create software in-house more quickly and effectively, enabling business people to work closely with IT people so that the software they build will be competitive and provide needed services to customers.
With CNCF technologies, organizations can build and run scalable applications in dynamic environments like public, private and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, immutable infrastructure, microservices, and declarative APIs are examples of this approach. Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to segment apps into microservices, package each part into its own separate container, and then dynamically orchestrate the containers as required to optimize resource utilization. Since the apps are not wired to any infrastructure components, they can scale up and down as needed. This approach increases the agility and maintainability of these apps, and ultimately supports cloud portability, which is an important inhibitor to vendor lock-in.
The CNCF hosts critical components of cloud native software stacks, including Kubernetes and Prometheus. Since coming into CNCF, Kubernetes has grown into one of the world’s most popular open source projects and provides container orchestration in more than half of the Fortune 100 companies. In August 2018 Google Cloud began transferring ownership and management of the Kubernetes project’s cloud resources to CNCF community contributors.