Thirty-two cloud computing companies building software around Kubernetes, the popular container-orchestration project, received a stamp of approval Monday from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation certifying interoperability between those products.
The list is a who’s who of cloud computing — with one notable exception I’ll address in a minute — and if your Kubernetes vendor has received the Certified Kubernetes designation, that means that workloads initially deployed on a product like Microsoft Azure Container Service or Red Hat’s OpenShift should work with other products that have also received that designation, the CNCF said in a release.
Kubernetes quickly became one of the most important open-source projects in the cloud computing world this year, two years after Google released a version of its container-orchestration system to the world. Kubernetes allows companies that have deployed their applications in containers to manage those deployments across multiple environments, and companies have lined up to support it as the de facto standard for container orchestration.
The CNCF is now codifying that support with the Certified Kubernetes program, which puts a firmer hand on the “light touch” approach to standards-setting that the CNCF has tried to follow. “The interoperability that this program ensures is essential to Kubernetes meeting its promise of offering a single open source software stack supported by many vendors that can deploy on any public, private or hybrid cloud,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of the CNCF, in a statement.
That notable exception referenced above? Amazon Web Services. AWS was a little late to the Kubernetes party, joining the CNCF after cloud rivals like founding member Google and Microsoft, but it has supported Kubernetes on its platform for some time.
Kohn told Techcrunch that AWS didn’t make the list because it has yet to release its own managed Kubernetes service, which a betting person should expect to see at least announced at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas in late November.
