AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch SUPERNAP, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks join new effort to build and maintain cloud native distributed systems

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., July 21, 2015 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

This new organization aims to advance the state-of-the-art for building cloud native applications and services, allowing developers to take full advantage of existing and to-be-developed open source technologies. Cloud native refers to applications or services that are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and micro services-oriented.

Founding organizations include AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch SUPERNAP, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks. Other organizations are encouraged to participate as founding members in the coming weeks, as the organization establishes its governance model.

“The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will help facilitate collaboration among developers and operators on common technologies for deploying cloud native applications and services,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “By bringing together the open source community’s very best talent and code in a neutral and collaborative forum, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to advance the state of the art of application development at Internet scale.”

Cloud native application development allows Internet companies to practically scale their businesses. Today this work is resource intensive, requiring companies to assemble a team of experts that can integrate disparate technologies and maintain all of them. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation intends to ease this process for developers and businesses by driving alignment among technologies and platforms.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation plans to create and drive the adoption of a new set of common container technologies driven and informed by technical merit and end user value and that is inspired by Internet-scale computing. This work seeks to improve the overall developer experience, paving the way for faster code reuse, improved machine efficiency, reduced costs and increases in the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

The Foundation will look at open source at the orchestration level, followed by the integration of hosts and services by defining API’s and standards through a code first approach to advance the state-of-art of container-packaged application infrastructure. The organization will also work with the recently announced Open Container Initiative on its container image specification. Beyond orchestration and the image specification, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to assemble components to address a comprehensive set of container application infrastructure needs.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will be responsible for stewardship of the projects, fostering growth and evolution of the ecosystem, promoting the technologies and serving the community by making the technology accessible and widely adopted. The Foundation will include a Technical Oversight Committee and an End User Advisory board to ensure alignment of needs between the technical and end-user communities.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Collaborative Projects are independently supported software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. By spreading the collaborative DNA of the largest collaborative software development project in history, The Linux Foundation provides the essential collaborative and organizational framework so project hosts can focus on innovation and results. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology. For more information about Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, please visit:http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/

For more information about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, please visit https://www.cncf.io

Comments from members

AT&T
“AT&T sees tremendous value in these initiatives,” said Toby Ford, assistant vice president of Cloud Technology, Architecture and Planning at AT&T. “We are very interested in helping to shape the container standards and architecture of the next-generation ecosystem that will deliver on the promise of cloud-enabled software. We are fully committed to this technology direction, as demonstrated by our Domain 2.0 initiative to migrate 75% of our targeted network onto a software defined network directed cloud.”

Cisco
“Cloud native applications are critical for companies that want to scale their business quickly and successfully,” said Dave Ward, CTO and Chief Architect, Cisco. “Efforts designed to simplify and improve the overall developer experience, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, are a great step forward. We’re excited to be a part of this community initiative to enable new technologies and innovation for developers, as well as our continued commitment to enable users by Open Source.”

Cloud Foundry Foundation
“Cloud Foundry is a platform explicitly designed for cloud native applications. Advances in containers, automation, and orchestration are important only if they serve the needs of those applications,” said Sam Ramji, CEO, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “Our users and members need collaborative innovation in orchestration, networking and storage across their cloud infrastructures. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will be an important venue for that work and a timely extension to the Cloud Foundry community’s work on cloud native application portability with members including Intel, IBM, Huawei, and VMware.”

CoreOS
“As the company behind Tectonic, the first commercial distribution of Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is providing a collaborative place for the Kubernetes ecosystem to grow,” said Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS. “We believe Kubernetes will become the standard for distributed infrastructure and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is an important step towards making that a reality.”

Cycle Computing
“Since our founding, Cycle has operated off of the simple premise that easier access to computing and storage resources increases innovation by decreasing the time it takes to solve compute challenges. Our participation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a logical step, we are honored to be a part of it,” said Jason Stowe, Cycle Computing CEO. “Containers and Kubernetes will help increase access to compute for big data, analytics and batch computing, and we look forward to collaborating with the community to remove the barriers to resources that analysts, engineers and scientists depend on.”

Docker
The Open Container Initiative announced last month at DockerCon establishes a foundation for container-based computing, with a common image and runtime format for containers. At the orchestration layer of the stack, there are many competing solutions and the standard has yet to be defined. Through our participation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we are pleased to be part of a collaborative effort that will establish interoperable reference stacks for container orchestration, enabling greater innovation and flexibility among developers. This is in line with the Docker Swarm integration with Mesos, which we demonstrated at DockerCon one month ago,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker.

eBay
“At eBay, we have been leading and innovating in building and operating one of the largest open private clouds in the world. The emerging landscape of containers and datacenter OS are creating unique opportunities for infrastructure providers and developers who want to seamlessly deliver cloud-first applications. We are excited to join Kubernetes foundation and lead the project in an open and community driven manner to help accelerate the pace of innovation and broad adoption of Kubernetes,” said Debashis Saha, Vice President of eBay Cloud Services.

Google
“Google is committed to advancing the state of computing, and to helping businesses everywhere benefit from the patterns that have proven so effective to us in operating at Internet scale. We believe that this foundation will help harmonize the broader ecosystem, and are pleased to contribute Kubernetes, the open source cluster scheduler, to the foundation as a seed technology,” said Craig McLuckie, Product Manager, Google Corporation.

Huawei
“We believe the foundation will drive standards and integrate common technologies, such as container and container orchestration, into an advanced end-to-end open source solution that promotes business adoption. By being part of the foundation, we hope we can lead and contribute in creating open standards and solutions. This is a continuation of our open source strategies. We continue to build advanced communication and information technologies based on open standards and solutions for solving our customer problems in moving to the cloud,” said Ying Xiong, chief architect of PaaS, Huawei.

IBM
“Growing, maintaining and rapidly expanding container and micro-service based applications across multiple clouds is a challenge without standards,” said Dr. Angel Diaz, IBM vice president of Cloud Architecture and Technology. “The creation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation reaffirms IBM’s long standing commitment to community driven open source answers to tough problems and we look forward to making contributions in support of containers and other open technologies as we deliver class leading container services through our Bluemix infrastructure.”

Intel
“Cloud native application development offers the promise of workload portability across stacks, and standardization helps drive full portability.” said Jonathan Donaldson, vice president of Software Defined Infrastructure at Intel. “Intel is committed to helping lead the Cloud Native Computing Foundation towards delivery of standards that ensure that enterprise developers can build cloud native applications with the confidence required to move this innovative delivery model forward.”

Joyent
“The Cloud Native Computing Foundation represents the next step in the evolution of open source software, in that it provides a mechanism for complementary projects to come together as a single and harmonized solution architecture,” said Scott Hammond, CEO of Joyent. “We are excited to be part of CNCF as a founding member and to begin working with our peer companies to make container-native computing broadly accessible.”

Kismatic
“I’m excited for the Kubernetes community as the creation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation fortifies Google’s commitment to open standards now orchestration is owned by the world consuming it vs. one corporate entity,” said Patrick Reilly, founder and CEO, Kismatic.

Mesosphere
“At Mesosphere, we see a major industry transformation underway, driven by the new class of technologies for managing containerized workloads, including Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and the Mesosphere DCOS,” said Florian Leibert, Co-Founder and CEO at Mesosphere. “By collaborating as an industry foundation we will accelerate customer adoption and help enterprises achieve scale plus true portability between clouds and their private data centers. Mesosphere’s vision is to make it possible for thousands of stateful and stateless services to run multi-tenant on the same clusters, simplifying operations, and maintaining proper access controls and security isolation between workloads. These are the new requirements for modern datacenters and the target of much of the innovation happening on the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS).”

Red Hat
“The rapid ascent of Linux containers and complementary technologies like Kubernetes shows that the future of enterprise application is not based in proprietary code; rather, these applications are born in the cloud and driven by open innovation,” said Lars Herrmann, general manager, Integrated Solutions Business Unit and Container Strategy, Red Hat. “We are pleased to be a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and will look to continue driving open standards around these technologies in order to foster even great enterprise adoption.”

Switch SUPERNAP
“These are exciting times in the evolution of more agile IT environments and Switch is dedicated to ensuring the industry adopts the most innovative standards to operate by. We are thrilled to be partnered with the other members of the Foundation to advance the building and operations of cloud native applications and services.” – Jason Mendenhall, EVP of Cloud, Switch SUPERNAP.

Univa
“Univa is excited to participate as a founding member of the new Cloud Native Computing Foundation,” said Gary Tyreman, CEO of Univa Corporation. “Enterprises want to capture the power and benefits of containerization and the industry is stepping up to the challenge. We look forward to sharing our extensive experience in workload optimization and resource management with the CNCF community.”

VMware
“Customers will benefit from the community’s collaboration via the Cloud Native Computing Foundation which will help to define common cloud native computing APIs, tools and frameworks,” said Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO, Cloud-Native Apps, VMware. “We are excited to work with the community to extend VMware’s software-defined data center offerings to support open technologies resulting from the foundation and beyond.”

Weaveworks
“With CNCF, container technologies will quickly become ubiquitous in application development, deployment and management. By focusing on the needs of all IT shops and not just an elite, the CNCF will drive rapid developer-led adoption. By enabling standard distributions, the CNCF will remove the need to hire armies of engineers to piece together a mosaic of ever-changing components. And by delivering interoperability, the CNCF simplifies almost any use case from web and data apps to distributed systems,” said Alexis Richardson, CEO, Weaveworks.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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