Chinese tech giant’s investment expands Foundation’s global footprint, advances machine learning opportunities for cloud native ecosystem

AUSTIN, TX – KUBECON + CLOUDNATIVECON NORTH AMERICA – December 6, 2017 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes® and Prometheus™, today announced that Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU) has joined the Foundation as a Gold Member.

Baidu is a global leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI), using methods including deep learning to develop new AI-enabled initiatives in areas such as autonomous driving, conversational AI, financial services and the cloud. Through collaborative open source development, Baidu and other members are greatly accelerating deep learning innovation with Kubernetes. Last year, Baidu open sourced its deep learning framework, PaddlePaddle, as part of its continued commitment to open source. Earlier this year the project announced compatibility with Kubernetes, making PaddlePaddle one of the first machine learning tools that supports Kubernetes. Baidu, CoreOS and other community members continue to enhance PaddlePaddle and fine-tune it for Kubernetes.

“Baidu has extensive experience in participating in open source communities,” said Watson Yin, Vice President of Baidu. “We decided to open source PaddePaddle over a year ago, and, this July, we announced our overarching commitment to an open platform and win-win AI ecosystem with our partners and developers. Baidu believes cloud native technologies are critical to accelerating machine learning. CNCF membership is a way for us to directly invest in many of the most cutting-edge, promising cloud native technologies to fuel richer, faster deep learning market growth.”

As the leading Chinese language Internet search provider, Baidu leverages its position at the intersection of big data, technology and search to accelerate the commercialization and application of AI technologies. The company is taking AI to the next stage through its technology and research into areas such as image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, and user profiling.

“Baidu is already highly engaged in the cloud native ecosystem through PaddlePaddle,” said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Kubernetes-powered PaddlePaddle enables cloud providers to offer deep learning at scale for major competitive differentiation. Baidu’s pioneering work with machine learning and Kubernetes will be invaluable to CNCF. We look forward to working with them across a range of cloud native capabilities.”

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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 cloud native software stacks including Kubernetes, Fluentd, linkerd, Prometheus, OpenTracing, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary, and TUF. CNCF serves as the neutral home for collaboration and brings together the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors – including the six largest public cloud providers and many of the leading private cloud companies. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit: https://www.cncf.io/.

About Baidu

Baidu, Inc. is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. Baidu aims to make a complex world simpler through technology. Baidu’s ADSs trade on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “BIDU”. Currently, ten ADSs represent one Class A ordinary share.

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