The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) annual report for 2020 is now available. The report highlights the growth of the community, events, projects, and more, over the past year.
As CNCF celebrated its fifth birthday in 2020, it achieved greater engagement through membership growth, event attendance growth, increased end user participation, and broad industry commentary. CNCF now hosts 70+ projects with over 103,000 contributors representing 177 countries. All of this underscored the growing role of Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies in the cloud computing ecosystem and beyond.
CNCF and the Linux Foundation also experienced a great loss this year in the passing of our longtime colleague and dear friend, Dan Kohn. Dan was one of the great open source leaders of our time, a brilliant mind – devoted to giving back to the community, and a loving husband and father who will truly be missed forever.
As cloud native technologies continue to scale across the world, touching almost every industry, CNCF has actively embraced diversity, something close to Dan’s heart. This diversity is also at the heart of the open source movement. Together we are stronger, faster, better, and more innovative than alone and apart, and that diversity makes us more resilient to weather any challenge — even the loss of a great leader.
Below are some highlights from the report.
Membership
We started the year with 518 members and through the course of 2020, added over 150 new members, an increase of more than 28% from 2019. We have welcomed a number of new Platinum and Gold members: Kasten by Veeam and Volcano Engine joined or upgraded to Platinum in 2020. Cox Communications, HCL Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intuit, SPD Bank, and T-Mobile all joined or upgraded to Gold in 2020.
End Users
Our End User Community grew to over 145 members in 2020, signaling clear and intense interest in cloud native technologies. At present, CNCF enjoys the largest end user community of any open source foundation.
In 2020, we published 17 case studies about a diverse group of end users, spanning the U.S., U.K., India, China, Sweden, El Salvador, Brazil, and Japan, and in industries ranging from software (Zendesk) and telecom (Vodafone) to travel (Booking.com) and government (U.S. Department of Defense).
Events
CNCF put on its first virtual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conferences in both Europe (August 17-20) and North America (November 17-20) and reached a record-breaking 22,787+ registrants with a 70% attendance rate during the NA event
While the pandemic limited our in person interaction, going virtual allowed CNCF to massively increase its conference reach. North America attendance increased 90% over the prior year’s in-person KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event in San Diego!
Projects
In 2020, CNCF-hosted projects Helm, Harbor, TikV, Rook, and etcd advanced Graduated, for a total of 14 projects. Argo, Contour, and Operator Framework joined at the incubating level. Buildpacks, Cortex, Dragonfly, Falco, KubeEdge, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and Thanos joined our 20 incubating projects from the Sandbox level.
Cloud native tech is not just for the cloud anymore. Builtin declared that “cloud-native technology is moving to the enterprise” because “legacy tech is waking up to cloud native”. Cloud native technologies are also driving the expansion of the “Wild West” of edge computing with many firms realizing the “financial benefits to taking the cloud native path”.
We look forward to continuing our momentum into 2021!