Just weeks after Microsoft signaled its support for a key cloud computing industry foundation, Amazon Web Services has followed suit, joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a platinum member.
The move to join the CNCF at the highest level resolves some questions about AWS and Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration product originally developed at Google that is quickly becoming a de-facto standard for managing containerized software development environments. The CNCF manages the Kubernetes project, and as part of joining the CNCF, AWS commits to spending time and money helping to build out that project as well as several smaller projects that make Kubernetes easier to use.
Adrian Cockcroft, vice president of cloud architecture strategy at AWS, will join the governing board of the CNCF. The CNCF is a less formal standards body compared to other efforts throughout history, but it is playing a key role in advancing projects like Kubernetes and cloud computing in general.
Just a few weeks ago, it wasn’t clear whether or not AWS was interesting in committing to a common standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes runs on AWS, of course, but allowing something to run on your service is quite different from actively supporting it, especially if you’re trying to convince customers to adopt your own container orchestration product.
Amazon has been pushing its own container orchestration product, Amazon EC2 Container Service, but there has been growing concern among a lot of cloud computing users and companies that AWS is only interested in products and services that entice customers to spend all their time and money inside AWS. Kubernetes makes it easier for cloud computing users to spread their workloads across multiple cloud providers as well as their own on-premises servers, and the support of AWS should alleviate a few (but certainly not all) of those concerns.
We’ve seen several signs of late that AWS was warming to Kubernetes, most recently via a report that the company was exploring the idea of developed a container-orchestration product on top of Kubernetes. Wednesday’s announcement makes that easier, and the backing of AWS means that anyone thinking about betting on Kubernetes can now rest assured that all major cloud providers are on board.
