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Tag: Cloud Native Computing Foundation

  • CNCF Launches Cloud Native Network Function Certification Program

    New CNF Test Suite-based program will allow CSPs and telecom organizations to adopt Kubernetes and cloud native tools with confidence

    Valencia, SPAIN, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe – May 18, 2022 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification Program. The CNF Certification Program will help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and other telecommunications organizations identify which Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) follow cloud native best practices.

    CNFs are applications that implement or facilitate network functionality in a cloud native way. CSPs and other telecom organizations are migrating away from traditional Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) toward CNFs and Kubernetes-based infrastructures that provide service reliability while lowering capital and operating expenses and encouraging cross-cloud compatibility. The program will enable NEPs and CNF creators to demonstrate the adoption of cloud native best practices in their networking products. 

    “Moving to cloud native infrastructures has long been difficult for telecom providers who have transitioned to VNFs and found themselves with siloed resources and specialized solutions not built for the cloud,” said Priyanka Sharma, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “The CNF Certification program is designed to fill this gap by creating solutions optimized for cloud native environments. Some of the world’s largest telecom organizations, including Huawei, Nokia, T-Mobile, and Vodafone, already use Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies, and this program will make it easier for others to do the same.”   

    The CNF Certification Program runs on CNCF’s CNF Test Suite and supports any product that runs in a certified Kubernetes environment. The CNF Test Suite is an open source test suite for telcos to validate how well they are following cloud native principles and best practices, like immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs. It leverages 10 CNCF-hosted projects and several open source tools, including Fluentd, Helm, Jaeger, and Prometheus. Currently, the CNF Test Suite can run approximately 70 workload tests, which are segmented into seven different categories, including: 

    • Compatibility, Installability & Upgradability
    • Microservice
    • State
    • Reliability, Resilience & Availability
    • Observability & Diagnostics
    • Security
    • Configuration

    To get started, NEPs and CNF creators can self verify an application using the CNF Test Suite and submit results via pull request. Organizations that may not be ready to submit their results can still get started with the CNF Test Suite and use it to improve the “cloud-nativeness” in their products. CNFs that pass the CNF Certification will be considered ‘Certified,’ with more advanced levels to come as the program expands. 

    To learn more about the CNF Certification Program or get involved in CNCF’s Telco initiatives:

    • Read CNCF’s recent blog, ‘Testing cloud native best practices with the CNF Test Suite’ 
    • Join the conversation on Slack (#cnf-certification, #cnf-testsuite-dev)
    • Attend CNF Test Suite Contributor calls on Thursdays at 14:15 UTC
    • Join the CNF Working Group meetings on Mondays at 16:00 UTC 

    Supporting Quotes:

    “Building, deploying, and operating Telco workloads across distributed cloud environments is complex,” said Tom Kivlin, principal cloud architect at Vodafone. “It is important to adopt cloud native best practices as we evolve to achieve our goals for agility, automation, and optimization. The CNF Certification is a great tool with which we can measure and drive cloud native practices across our platforms and network functions. We look forward to working with our partners and the CNCF community to further develop and drive adoption of the CNF Certification Program.”

    “MATRIXX is excited to participate in the CNCF CNF Certification Program. We believe it will be instrumental in helping the telecom industry adopt cloud native technologies and best practices by harnessing the power of open source innovation and community collaboration,” said Marc Price, CTO, MATRIXX Software. “To realize the full potential of 5G, service providers are transitioning to CNFs, though telecom networking presents new and unique challenges that require a continued evolution in cloud native best practices. This program will help our advancements in cloud native solutions while ensuring customers can implement these tools with confidence.”

    “PANTHEON.tech is delighted to be part of CNCF’s initiative to show what cloud native computing should strive to be for telecom organizations,” said Miroslav Mikluš, CPO of PANTHEON.tech. “We’re excited to demonstrate our expertise in cloud native network functions by being one of the pioneering solutions to try the CNF Certification. Open source values and cloud native best practices are at the heart of what we do, and we are glad to be part of CNCF‘s effort to drive these forward.”

    Additional Resources

    About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

    Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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    The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

    Media Contact
    Katie Meinders
    The Linux Foundation
    PR@CNCF.io

  • Cloud Native Computing Foundation Hits 800 Member Milestone at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022

    An additional 38 organizations have joined the Foundation this quarter to make cloud native computing ubiquitous and accessible to all

    Valencia, SPAIN, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe – May 18, 2022 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced today the addition of 38 organizations, dedicated to working together with over 800 other members to drive innovation through the development and standardization of cloud native technology. 

    “We are thrilled to welcome so many Europe-based organizations this quarter as our global community convenes in Spain for the first in-person KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in three years,” said Priyanka Sharma, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We are humbled to see the continued momentum in our diverse ecosystem of doers and look forward to working together to foster and sustain our growing number of projects.” 

    About the newest Silver Members:

    • Ambient IT is a French training organization specializing in IT and digital professions.
    • Andes Digital is a consulting company focused on Open Source solutions, especially in the multi-cloud – hybrid-cloud space offering services such as enterprise integration, Kubernetes managed services, cloud migration and others. 
    • Aokumo is a cloud infrastructure company that helps organizations modernize, innovate, and accelerate their digital transformation on AWS and Azure with Cloud-Native Solutions, Kubernetes, DevOps, CI/CD, and Data Analytics. 
    • Appaegis Access Fabric secures cloud infrastructure access with advanced Zero Trust strategies to secure application and data access and mitigate permission abuse by federating control plane sources of IAM, Key vault and credential management and monitoring data plane transactions. 
    • Appstellar is a Cloud and DevOps company delivering cloud software development and DevOps solutions (including Kubernetes Enablement and AWS Cloud Consulting) to businesses that want to reach new heights
    • Aserto is reinventing Auth: instead of focusing on user login and authentication, our modern authorization platform makes it easy for software developers to define, enforce, and evolve what users are permitted to do inside their applications. 
    • Atos is the global leader in secure and decarbonized digital with a range of market-leading digital solutions along with consultancy services, digital security and decarbonization offerings; an end-to-end partnership approach.
    • Avanade is the leading provider of innovative digital, cloud and advisory services, industry solutions and design-led experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem. 
    • B1 Systems provides consulting, training, managed service & support for Linux / Open Source – cloud & container technologies, virtualization & high availability as well as monitoring, system & configuration management. 
    • claion is a professional company leading the next IT trend through powerful drives.
    • Clockwork empowers next generation time-sensitive applications by enabling “congestion-free, zero-drop networks” using its scalable and accurate time synchronization technology.
    • Cloudshape is a multi and hybrid cloud solution provider offering services and solutions around Application Modernization, Dev(Sec)Ops and Kubernetes 
    • Cloudside is your trusted team of cloud-native and data problem solvers, helping you drive the best business outcomes with cloud as a catalyst 
    • Cycode is a complete software supply chain security solution that provides visibility, security, and integrity across all phases of the SDLC.
    • Doppler is the multi-cloud SecretOps Platform developers and security teams trust to provide secrets management at enterprise scale. 
    • Edgeless Systems is building Constellation, the Kubernetes distribution for confidential computing.
    • Entando is the leading open-source application composition platform for Kubernetes. 
    • Exein is a leading company in embedded security; the first security ecosystem for the IoT devices development and management cycle. 
    • groundcover is the first eBPF-based production monitoring tool that makes complete K8s observability easy. groundcover provides a full picture of your production and covers every application instantly with no code changes. 
    • Mayfield is a global venture capital firm with a people-first philosophy and a 50+ year track record of inception and early-stage investing, partnering with founders to build iconic enterprise, consumer and engineering biology companies. 
    • Miraxia is a software consulting company providing middleware design and optimization services for edge devices with the aid of a lot of experience in the consumer electronics industry for 20+ years. 
    • MoreSec Tech was founded in April 2016 and headquartered in Hangzhou, China. In the vanguard of cloud-native security, MoreSec provides a full-stack and full life cycle cloud-native application protection platform, which starts in development and extends to runtime protection of infrastructure, microservice networks, workloads, applications and data
    • OpsVerse provides open source-based, fully managed DevOps tools that customers can deploy anywhere within minutes to improve their MTTR, MTTD, and developer productivity. 
    • Skyloud is a company specializing in new Cloud technologies. We support Startups and Companies in setting up, optimizing and managing Cloud Native infrastructure. 
    • Spacelift empowers collaborative infrastructure for modern software teams to manage any cloud, infrastructure, or service. 
    • Speedscale is a Kubernetes traffic replay framework that reproduces production-like conditions in non-prod environments so teams can identify performance and scale issues before their customers do.
    • SphereEx builds distributed data infrastructures and delivers a SaaS experience through the cloud, and was founded by the core team of Apache ShardingSphere – an open source ecosystem to transform any database into a distributed database system and enhance it with data sharding, elastic scaling, encryption features & more. 
    • Superblocks is a programmable internal tooling platform for developers to build custom internal apps, workflows and scheduled jobs fast. Try it for free today!
    • Tenable® is the Cyber Exposure company, helping approximately 40,000 organizations around the globe understand and reduce cyber risk by giving them visibility into their attack surface. Tenable delivered the world’s first platform to see and secure any digital asset on any computing platform. 
    • TL Consulting helps accelerate your Cloud native journey through the delivery of high-end transformational services and enterprise-grade solutions by harnessing the power of Kubernetes, microservices and multi-cloud environment automation to effectively modernise your application landscape and future proof your business. 
    • Uniserver is a Netherlands-based cloud distributor, we give you the freedom and security to focus on your own strenght without worrying about your IT infrastructure. 
    • Zelarsoft, the creators of Klusternetes: Kubernetes virtual clusters in less than a minute, on the infrastructure of your choice, either cloud or on-premise, enabling self-service k8s without adding operational complexity.

    About the newest Academic Member:

    • ICPSR advances and expands social and behavioral research, acting as a global leader in data stewardship and providing rich data resources and responsive educational opportunities for present and future generations.

    About the newest End User Members:

    • Prodigy Education is a global leader in game-based learning. Our mission is to help every student in the world love learning, motivating millions worldwide via fun, secure and accessible curriculum-aligned gameplay experiences. 
    • Wayfair is one of the world’s largest destinations for the home, an e-commerce leader serving 27 million customers with suppliers and operations throughout North America and Europe, employing more than 16,000 people.

    About the newest End User Supporters:

    • Juni is the financial companion that provides ecommerce entrepreneurs with an all-in-one financial platform to make better decisions, scale up, and unlock the full potential of ecommerce.
    • SNCF is a world leader in public transportation.
    • Volvo Group is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of trucks, buses, construction equipment and marine and industrial engines.

    With the addition of these new members, there are now over 145 organizations in the CNCF End User Community. This group regularly meets to share adoption best practices and feedback on project roadmaps and future projects for CNCF technical leaders to consider.

    Additional Resources

    About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

    Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

    ###

    The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

    Media Contact
    Jessie Adams-Shore
    The Linux Foundation
    PR@CNCF.io

  • OpenTelemetry and the Future of Monitoring Instrumentation

    OpenTelemetry and the Future of Monitoring Instrumentation

    OpenTelemetry is an open source project to provide a de facto standard trace API and a metric and log agent to end vendor lock-in

    It’s no surprise that understanding the internal health of applications and systems is a high priority for developers and SREs. It’s a well-understood problem with dozens of vendors focused on helping companies diagnose application performance in real-time.

    While the actual platform doing the metric, log or trace analysis tends to see most of the focus, a critical component of the data pipeline is, and has always been, the actual instrumentation. That includes APIs and SDKs for application traces as well as installable agents to gather metrics and logs. In the past, this has been a highly fragmented space with both open source and proprietary agents and SDKs. Most APM vendors have provided their own proprietary instrumentation libraries that, intentionally or not, create a vendor lock-in at a code-level that isn’t ideal for most organizations.

    To address this challenge, an open source project was created with a highly aspirational goal of providing a de facto standard trace API along with a metric and log agent that would eliminate this fragmentation, create a unified standard and effectively end vendor lock-in.

    The project, OpenTelemetry, was officially started in May 2019. It is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project and came out of the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects. They’ve since expanded their goal to include not only application tracing and code instrumentation, but also metric and log collection. They are essentially covering all the critical telemetry points in a system or application.

    Imagine if, regardless of the platform you ultimately sent the data to, you could instrument your code with the same libraries, the same agents and a single set of binaries and libraries. It would dramatically simplify the deployment process, internal training and make it trivial to change or add analytics platforms as needed. This is the promise of the OpenTelemetry project.

    A project like this doesn’t get far without significant support. This is where OpenTelemetry shows incredible promise to realize widespread adoption quickly. Nearly all the largest monitoring and cloud vendors including AWS, Google, Microsoft, Splunk, New Relic and many more have thrown their weight behind OpenTelemetry. They’re actively contributing and supporting the project. One by one, these organizations have come to the agreement that the telemetry component is not the differentiating feature. Instead, they are working together to provide a best-of-breed experience at the telemetry layer.

    The project is in beta, and the potential is huge. OpenTelemetry modernizes every aspect of the telemetry system. It eliminates vendor lock-in. It will outperform the vast majority of existing agents. It simplifies installation and training by reducing dozens of agents and libraries to just one.

    So where to get started?

    It’s still early, but depending on your platform of choice, it may already support OpenTelemetry. If so, look into the existing libraries and test them out in your internal sandbox environments. You’re likely to find improvements over your existing telemetry tools, although there will certainly be gaps in things such as development language support and metric/log integrations. It should give you a sense of the scope, potential and maturity of the project and help to determine whether this is a viable solution for your next deployments.

    The big question mark is whether this will live up to its potential. With the high-quality team assembled, the support of the community and industry and with a truly impactful mission, it will. Ideally, within a few years, this will be how we instrument and gather data from our applications regardless of where we send that data.

  • CNCF Graduates TUF Project to Secure Software Updates

    CNCF Graduates TUF Project to Secure Software Updates

    The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced today that an open source specification for securing software update systems has graduated to becoming a top-level project.

    The Update Framework (TUF) is made up of a set of libraries, file formats and utilities that can authenticate files and images before they are downloaded from a software repository. Justin Cappos, associate professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering who led the development of TUF, said the framework enables IT organizations to better secure their software supply chains.

    In addition, TUF isolates artifacts in a repository in a modular fashion that not only limits the amount of damage that can be inflicted by a breach of the repository, but Cappos said it also makes it easier for IT organizations to roll that repository back to its last known good state.

    For a CNCF project to graduate it needs to demonstrate thriving adoption, an open governance process and a strong commitment to community, sustainability and inclusivity. TUF was developed at the University of Washington in 2009 by Cappos and Justin Samuel. TUF has been based at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, which makes a reference implementation available to any interested party, since 2011. It became a CNCF project in 2017 and is now the first security-oriented project to graduate among the eight other CNCF projects that have graduated.

    TUF is already employed within Notary, a separate CNCF project that provides a mechanism to both certify the validity of the sources of Docker images and encrypt the content of those images. TUF is also employed within Uptane, which is employed to deliver software updates to automobiles. Other organizations using TUF in production environments include Amazon, VMware, Google, IBM, Red Hat, Datadog and DigitalOcean.

    Cappos said he would like to see TUF adopted more broadly to secure software supply chains in medical systems as well as critical infrastructure systems such as the power grid. As cyberattacks targeting these systems increase, Cappos said it’s apparent there is a need for a more resilient approach to securing software running on these types of platforms.

    Longer-term, as organizations embrace best DevSecOps processes, it’s now only a matter of time before organizations focus more of their time and energy on securing the software supply chain. However, Cappos said right now there is too much focus on trying to discover application dependencies and scanning images. While those are important tactical tools, Cappos said there needs to be more focus on strategic approaches to securing software supply chains.

    It’s not clear to what degree DevSecOps will ultimately push organizations to embrace a more holistic approach to building and managing software supply chains or whether larger concerns about the security of software will push more organizations to embrace DevSecOps. Regardless of whether the impetus for building and deploying more secure software comes from the top down or the bottom up within an organization, the important thing is that in terms of tools and processes rapid advances are finally being made.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CNCF Advances Jaeger Distributed Tracing Project

    CNCF Advances Jaeger Distributed Tracing Project

    The open source Jaeger distributed tracing platform has officially graduated into the top tier of projects being stewarded by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

    Designed to be employed within any DevOps environment, Jaeger is a tool for monitoring transactions across complex distributed computing environments. It consists of a backend for trace collection and analysis and multiple client libraries implementing the OpenTracing application programming interface (API) in various languages.

    Developed by Uber, Jaeger now integrates with tools such as OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, Envoy and Prometheus to make it easier to discover the root cause of issues impacting transactions in complex IT environments. For example, DevOps teams can apply data mining techniques and machine learning algorithms to analyze data from a specific cluster.

    JaegerYuri Shkuro, a software engineer for Uber who works on the Jaeger project, said organizations may rely on tools such as Prometheus to monitor environments, but once an issue is identified, it typically takes a tool such as Jaeger to identify the root causes of an issue. The primary reason for that approach is the amount of data that distributed tracing tools would store if they were to run continuously, he said.

    Organizations that are already using Jaeger in production environments include GrafanaLabs, Northwestern Mutual, SeatGeek, Symantec, Ticketmaster, Uber, Weaveworks and Zenly.

    Jaeger is also starting to be bundled with other platforms, such as the Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh. As that trend continues, more organizations are likely to become exposed to Jaeger as a tool for debugging a wide variety of issues.

    Although originally developed to address the inherent complexity associated with microservices, Jaeger also can be applied to monolithic applications, Shkuro said. While many of those monolithic applications eventually are likely to be deconstructed into a set of microservices, many of those applications are not going away anytime soon, he noted.

    Jaeger now has 15 active maintainers from four companies, with more than 1,200 contributors and 375 authors of commits and pull requests. It also has more than 9,000 GitHub stars and has been pulled from Docker Hub more than 10 million times.

    While distributed tracing as a concept has been around for a while, the rise of microservices is forcing IT teams to look for tools that make it possible to engage in deeper forensics. The dependencies between microservices coupled with the ephemeral nature of containers often make it challenging for IT organizations to discover the root cause of intermittent issues. Within IT environments that have adopted Kubernetes to run those containers, it’s also become easier to deploy Jaeger using tools as Kubernetes templates, Operator software and a Helm Chart.

    As developers are held more accountable for applications, interest in programmable forensics tools is rising. Performance issues that developers once viewed as a problem to be solved by faceless IT operations staffs are now being solved much faster by developers. As a result, application experiences have improved now that developers are seeking out tools such as Jaeger to identify issues that are preventing them from focusing their efforts on writing additional code. Given the long, difficult history of IT, there are more than a few IT leaders wondering what took them so long to figure that out.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CNCF Advances CloudEvents Specification

    CNCF Advances CloudEvents Specification

    In a move that portends well for future cloud interoperability initiatives, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today announced that the open source CloudEvents specification for describing event data had achieved a version 1.0 milestone.

    Doug Davis, senior technical staff member of IBM and co-chair of CNCF’s Serverless WG and the CloudEvents project, said CloudEvents will make it possible to not only define common attributes of an event to facilitate interoperability, but also make it easier to share those attributes between, for example, a repository such as GitHub and an application or tool that needs to consume those events.

    With that foundation in place, it also should become easier to build tools spanning serverless and event-driven architectures, he added.

    Work on the CloudEvents specification began in May 2018 as a sandbox project. With the release of CloudEvents 1.0, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) is now designating CloudEvents as an incubation project. Active contributors to the CloudEvents project include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Red Hat and VMware. In fact, CloudEvents has already been implanted within the Eventing framework of Knative, an open source middleware project led by Google to integrate Kubernetes with various serverless computing frameworks. Other platforms that support CloudEvents include Microsoft Azure Event Grid, Red Hat EventFlow, Eclipse Vert.x and Debezium, SAP Kyma and the Event Gateway from Serverless.com.

    Davis said given the level of support for CloudEvents project, there is reason to be optimistic for future cloud interoperability initiatives. Cloud interoperability has been hampered by a dizzying array of application programming interfaces that often are proprietary. CloudEvents represents one of the few interoperability projects that has drawn support from all the major cloud service providers. Part of the success CloudEvents has enjoyed in that regard can be attributed to the limited scope of the initiative, he noted.

    It may be a while before organizations don’t have to worry about being locked into a cloud. However, as a general rule of thumb the more they focus on de facto specifications and application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed by platforms such as Kubernetes, the easier it will be to move applications from one platform to another. In many cases, DevOps teams today routinely struggle with moving applications that might have been developed on a public cloud onto an on-premises production environment. Longer term, it’s also expected IT leaders will want to be able to negotiate lower rates from cloud services providers by threatening to move workloads between cloud service providers.

    In the meantime, as event-driven architectures such as serverless computing frameworks continue to become more popular, IT leaders can take some comfort in the fact that interoperability across these architectures is advancing. Of course, it’s too early to say when the CloudEvents specification will become a fully graduated CNCF project, but it is already apparent many cloud service providers are not waiting on that official recognition before implementing it. The challenge and opportunity for DevOps teams now are to figure out how best to employ this capability to create new applications that previously would have been too difficult even to attempt.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Cloud Native Computing Foundation Kicks Off Berlin Event with Five New International Members

    BERLIN – CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe – March 29, 2017 – T​he Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is sustaining and integrating open source technologies to orchestrate containers as part of a microservices architecture, today announced that Hangzhou HarmonyCloud Technology LTD, QAware, Solinea, SUSE and TenxCloud have joined the Foundation as its newest members. These new members will join the 1,500 cloud native developers, users and experts in Berlin for CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe.

    Based in U.S, China and Europe, the new members represent fast-growing regions for cloud native activity and are committed to investing in, contributing to and sponsoring the development of applications based on microservices, containerization and dynamic orchestration.

    “The cloud native movement is increasingly spreading to all parts of the world, which is on display this week at our flagship event in Berlin,” said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We’re excited to welcome new members from Europe and Asia and showcase some of the most prolific cloud native developers and users in the world at CloudNativeCon/KubeCon. As we gain more international members, CNCF is able to have a broader, deeper impact on the future of the cloud native ecosystem.”

    About the newest gold member:

     SUSE, headquartered in Germany, is a pioneer in open source software working to facilitate applications and developers as it provides reliable, interoperable Linux, cloud infrastructure and storage solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. Twenty-five years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help SUSE’s customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. SUSE provides customers a holistic approach to orchestration and management by providing Kubernetes-as-a-Service capabilities in SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7, a Kubernetes-integrated container OS delivered with SUSE Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) Platform, and the convergence of CaaS and PaaS with the soon-to-be-released SUSE solution based on Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes as a key component.

    “Modern business is moving to the software-defined data center to optimize mission-critical availability and quickly deliver new services,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO at SUSE. “SUSE solutions enable innovative open source technologies that are hardened for software-defined infrastructure-based enterprise operations, backed by outstanding support. This move toward software-defined infrastructure includes a growing emphasis on container and cloud technologies, and CNCF has become the natural home for many of the leading open source projects that will enable the software-defined data center of the future. This the ideal time for SUSE to join the CNCF community as a gold member, as SUSE is focused on providing customers with a holistic approach to orchestration and management.”

     About the newest silver members:

    HarmonyCloud, based in Hangzhou, is a container-based cloud platform provider focused on building enterprise PaaS platforms on open source projects like Kubernetes. The company provides enterprise clients with enhanced features on runtime security, networking and storage, and enabling microservice-based applications, distributed tracing and automated CI/CD.
    “The core HarmonyCloud team, which is from SEL Lab Zhejiang University, has made great contributions to Kubernetes and the cloud native space,” said Aoyu Wang, CEO of HarmonyCloud. “We’ve used our knowledge and expertise to automate and optimize the deployment of cloud applications based on container technologies, and this makes CNCF membership a perfect fit for us. We look forward to making continued contributions to the container-based technologies fostered and incubated by CNCF.”

    QAware, based in Germany, is an independent software manufacturer and consultancy – analyzing, renovating, developing and implementing software systems and cloud native applications for customers whose success heavily depends on IT. These applications provide enterprises with a decisive advantage, as they make processes and products possible that were previously unimaginable.

    “Building cloud native applications is a revolutionary way of making systems possible that were previously unimaginable,” said Josef Adersberger, CTO at QAware. “We love to share our experience, drive discussions with other cloud native experts and contribute to leading open source technology, which is why we are very happy to join forces with the CNCF.”

    Solinea, headquartered in San Francisco, is the leading professional services partner that accelerates enterprise cloud adoption. The company works with enterprises and service providers to help them achieve their agile, secure and transformational objectives by developing multi and hybrid cloud adoption strategies, driving cloud native enablement through the integration of containers and microservices, and accelerating application delivery to the cloud through innovative DevOps solutions.

    “Partnering with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is the right decision as we look ahead at how best to architect and deploy open, vendor-agnostic cloud solutions for our current and future clients,” says Francesco Paola, CEO of Solinea. “As we work with leading global enterprises and service providers to architect and deploy cloud, container and microservices solutions at scale, to drive agility into the organization, it is important for us to work with an exceptional team that understand our clients’ needs. CNCF is the right choice.”

    TenxCloud, based in Beijing, is an innovation-driven cloud computing company founded in 2014. It is the first Kubernetes-based enterprise-class container cloud platform in China. The platform provides application-centric container cloud products and solutions that cover lightweight container virtualization, microservices, DevOps, continuous delivery and more.

    “At the end of 2015, TenxCloud released China’s first enterprise-based container cloud platform based on the open source project Kubernetes, we want to help enterprises to achieve rapid delivery of business applications and continuous innovation,” said Jerry Huang, CEO of TenxCloud. “The development of TenxCloud benefits from the open source community, so it’s our pleasure to promote the development of container technology and we look forward to making contributions to CNCF’s projects.”

    Additional Resources

    About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

    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 optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of those software stacks including Kubernetes, Fluentd, Linkerd, Prometheus, OpenTracing, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, and rkt; brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors; and serves as a neutral home for collaboration. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit: https://cncf.io/.

    — Jules Louis

  • Q&A: CNCF on Instilling a DevOps Culture, Part 2

    Q&A: CNCF on Instilling a DevOps Culture, Part 2

    In part one of this two-part series, devopsy.kinsta.cloud introduced the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a nonprofit organization with 49 members engaged in promoting the development of cloud native applications. Let’s continue with the CNCF’s thoughts on instilling a DevOps culture.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: Why do developers need the freedom to choose how they build software? What kinds and levels of freedom? Is this about approaches, development tools or something else?

    Brian Grant: All of the above: approaches, tools, languages … Different solutions work better for different workloads, scenarios, environments and people. Even new applications developed from scratch to be cloud-native aren’t typically developed in a vacuum—their developers may be familiar with particular languages or tools, the new application may need to interact with legacy applications; it may need to be built with and/or deployed onto existing infrastructure, etc. Often developers need to be able to adopt new technologies or approaches incrementally.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How do you recommend providing this freedom to developers? How do you help provide it?

    Grant: Containers provide an ideal mechanism for providing this freedom, since they can be used to deploy both new and legacy applications, written in any language, built by any tool, into any environment. It’s a goal of the CNCF to foster an ecosystem of composable technologies, such as Kubernetes that facilitate the management of container-packaged applications.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?

    Grant: Because containers are small and fast, one application can be packed in each container image. Consequently, immutable container images can be created at build/release time rather than deployment time, since each application doesn’t need to be composed with the rest of the application stack nor integrated into the production infrastructure environment. This empowers developers to deliver deployable artifacts to operations.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How is code reuse a need of the developer?

    Craig McLuckie: The vast majority of the actual code that is run in any given deployment is written by others. Only a tiny fraction of code in any given instance is actually written by the developer. The rest is everything from common libraries, to full OSS subsystems, to commercial software that systems, to adjacent software projects that provide some business functions. Developers need a common way to integrate with existing systems (when it makes sense) or to find and reuse existing code in a way that is controlled and operations-friendly.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How do you recommend giving developers the ability to reuse code? How does your organization help with this?

    McLuckie: CNCF stands behind two technologies that are critical to code reuse. The first is the use of containers, which represent an intrinsically easy and predictable way to reuse even a relatively complex piece of software. The second is microservices-based architecture that make it easy to wire together systems and reuse existing services versus having to build their own.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?

    McLuckie: Containers make operations far more predictable and reduce possible avenues of error when deploying and updating systems. Rather than run potentially error prone imperative configuration systems to reuse code, containers are simple, lightweight and predictable, and reduce the potential for errors.

    Microservices allow for better operations specialization and create systems that are more intrinsically agile and easy to evolve. They allow for smaller teams that are focused on delivering a specific function versus having to align around large system boundaries. This creates a more productive and operationally viable environment.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: What is cloud-native? What does that mean?

    McLuckie: For CNCF, ‘cloud native’ is about a new pattern of application development that was pioneered by the internet companies, but that is equally applicable to developers and operators running more traditional workloads.

    We see three common attributes that make systems ‘cloud-native’:

    Container-packaged: Applications and processes are run in software containers as a unit of application deployment, which facilitates reproducibility, transparency and resource isolation. This improves overall developer experience, fosters code and component reuse, and simplifies operations.

    Dynamically managed: Applications are actively scheduled and managed. This radically improves machine efficiency and resource utilization while reducing the costs associated with maintenance and operations.

    Microservices-oriented: Applications are loosely coupled, with dependencies explicitly specified. This significantly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

    Together, these three capabilities allow developers to build systems that are intrinsically agile and scale well. They significantly reduce the operational complexity of running an application, allowing operators to be more focused on application-level concerns and relying heavily on smart systems to do the operations heavy lifting.

  • Q&A: CNCF on Instilling a DevOps Culture, Part 1

    Q&A: CNCF on Instilling a DevOps Culture, Part 1

    The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a non-profit comprised of some 49 industry participants that have come together to drive development and adoption of cloud-native applications and services. The CNCF is uniting such giants as Google, IBM, Intel and Cisco Systems to distill a collection of container technologies that end-user companies deem praiseworthy to reach its goal.

    The CNCF intends its membership to represent end users (the CNCF website lists one end user, Goldman Sachs), cloud and container technologies, online and IT services, and academic institutions.

    On behalf of the CNCF, Craig McLuckie, its Governing Board chair, and Brian Grant, its Technical Oversight Committee representative, weigh in on leading the DevOps transformation and instilling a DevOps culture in this two-part Q&A.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How is the CNCF specifically involved in leading the DevOps transformation by instilling the DevOps culture, in the industry or in member companies, for example?

    McLuckie: We believe that at the heart of the DevOps culture is the need to reduce the friction and, indeed, the barriers between teams that build an application and the teams that run an application. Developers learn to think about an application as a living service that evolves continuously and rapidly to meet the evolving business needs. Operations is there to deliver the tools and environment needed for them to successfully drive their application.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: Why do developers need an environment that is safe to change? What kind of change? Safe how?

    McLuckie: Safe change has many potential meanings: The first kind of “safe” is about creating deterministic behavior in operations. Does the system handle a change correctly every time? If I make a change to two systems, will they have the same state? How about to 1,000 systems? It’s important to focus on creating strong determinism by removing the moving parts in a production deployment.

    The second kind of “safe” is about being able to validate that a change is good—not just in pre-production environments, but in the actual production environment—with a simple and deterministic rollback. It is important to make it trivial to replicate environments, and offer a way to run a simple experiment in production (e.g. route 1 percent of my traffic to this new version) with the option to deterministically roll forward or backward without effort.

    A third kind of “safe” is about being able to ensure that every change is deliberate. One of the problems we often see in production systems is “configuration drift” that isn’t driven through any kind of formal process. This should be addressed by creating a strongly declarative toolset that makes every change deliberate and trackable.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How do you recommend providing these things that developers need? How do you help provide them?

    McLuckie: There are multiple issues like data, security governance and applications that need to be addressed. Additionally, companies want to deliver apps with high velocity. How do you solve all of this? A vendor-neutral organization that can harmonize emerging technologies is important for facilitating cloud-native. Given the large number of players in the marketplace with competing approaches, having an open source way to solve this is also important.

    Grant: Cloud-native infrastructure enables self-service and “hands-off” operation, including provisioning, deployment, scaling, healing, discovery, monitoring and more, with relatively little marginal effort for specific applications. By supporting open source projects such as Kubernetes and Prometheus that provide such functionality, the CNCF hopes to democratize high-velocity application delivery, which was previously achievable mainly by web-scale companies.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?

    Grant: In a DevOps culture, operators are both partners and customers of the developers. Developers take responsibility for meeting operational requirements: security, reliability, availability, scalability, efficiency, actionable monitoring and logging output, necessary configurability, compatibility with the production environment, etc. Cloud-native infrastructure provides mechanisms developers and operators need to facilitate and capitalize on those capabilities.

    Stay tuned for part two of the CNCF interview.