Introduction to Kubernetes - The Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Quick 101 about Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the K8S Project

Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the K8S Project

If you thought that THIS and THISwas all about Kuberntes basics, then you really should google “CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape” 🙂

If you come across the CNCF you probably know about their open source, vendor agnostic, cloud native hub for hosting different projects. Most of them are tailored to work with Kubernetes, and they level up the K8S from a potent tool to a real beast!

In general CNCF projects can have either of four statuses that are called project maturity levels. The maturity level is a clear indication of the risks associated with the adoption of a given project. The more mature the project is, the lower the risk of its introduction and subsequent maintenance.

Do I even need to mention that Kubernetes is a CNCF project itself? Kubernetes was accepted to CNCF on March 16, 2016 and is at the Graduated project maturity level.

Those project maturity levels are

  • Graduated Projects, that is stable, widely adopted, and production ready project,
  • Incubating Projects, that is a project with some production user base and some community around it.
  • Sandbox Project is a work in progress, still not used in many production environments.
  • Experimental projects not yet widely tested in production on the bleeding edge of technology.

One extra status is

  • Archived Projects that have reached the end of their lifecycle and have become inactive.

Simple right?

There is also a formal project approval path in place as well and the CNCF community itself is very active and willing to support both businesses like individuals. All this is held together by an umbrella under the care of The Linux Foundation, which has years of experience and know-how, which allows us to think positively about the future of CNCF.

What are the benefits of being a CNCF Project?

Benefits from participation in the program are multi-level and apply to both the developers of the project and end users who use the project. This is a real win-win situation!

Actually win-win-win for more than one reason but about that later.

CNCF provides a backbone of services to open source projects in order to sustain most project needs outside of code management and technical decisions. These services are offered as part of community stability, but do not replace developers on the projects themselves. The goal is to cultivate CNCF’s graduating and incubating projects, and offer sandbox projects the space to grow into incubating projects.

From my conversations with companies using projects – both business and developers – as well as their end users, I can see clearly repeated key perks of using tool that is CNCF project:

  • Well-Defined Development Process: Projects follow a structured development process that encourages collaboration and feedback. This process includes regular meetings, code reviews, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices. This ensures that the project is always moving forward and improving, with input from a diverse group of contributors.

  • Large and Growing Community: They have a large and active community of users and developers. This community is a valuable resource for getting help, sharing ideas, and collaborating on new features. The community also contributes to the robustness of the project, as more users mean more testing and feedback.

  • Platform for Innovation: Projects serve as a platform for innovation. They provide a foundation upon which businesses can build and grow rapidly. By leveraging the work already done in these projects, businesses can focus on creating unique value for their customers.

  • Improved Code Quality: CNCF projects help to improve the quality of code. They follow best practices for coding and design, which results in code that is more maintainable, efficient, and reliable. The use of code reviews and automated testing further ensures the quality of the code.

  • Compliance with Standards and Best Practices: They follow mature processes that ensure compliance with the latest standards and best practices. This includes things like security standards, data privacy regulations, and accessibility guidelines.

  • Stability and Predictability: Tools that are CNCF projects offer a high degree of stability and predictability. They use semantic versioning, which provides clear and predictable rules for version compatibility. This allows users to upgrade to new versions with confidence.

  • Backward Compatibility: Projects are committed to maintaining backward compatibility. This means that users can upgrade to new versions without worrying about breaking changes. This commitment to backward compatibility reduces the risk and cost of upgrades.

  • Focus on Quality: They have a strong focus on quality. They use extensive open testing and code review processes to ensure that the code is of high quality. This results in software that is reliable and performs well.

  • Flexible Licensing Model: They use a flexible licensing model. This allows users to choose the level of open source involvement that best suits their needs. Users can choose to use the software as-is, contribute to the project, or even fork the project and make their own modifications.

How can I support The Cloud Native Computing Foundation?

Well… that depends. Are you an individual or do you represent an organization? You know there is a difference between non-for-profit foundation and a big software house.

So it really depends.

Are you a community leader, developer, admin? As a contributor I would like to say that we all would love to have you involved, but I understand that you may want to or already be involved with other foundations, or just don’t have time and that is not a problem! You can participate in working with the repository, you can take part in various events organized around the world and online all year round, or you can simply share this post to reach more people.

If you are a corporation, there are a few different ways for you to get involved depending on what you are looking for and what you feel comfortable with.

You can become a General Member and join industry peers to build and shape the cloud native ecosystem for the future. General Membership is for organizations that build their own services and products on, or integrated with, CNCF projects.

It’s an obvious win-win-win situation I was mentioning before. You take unprecedented advantage of w brand recognition, it can be a major marketing strategy for your company! By simply doing what you need to do to exist as a company, you not only help yourself, but you also help the developers of the project and end users who use the project. Win-Win-Win

If you are an end user, which means a company that uses cloud native technologies internally, but does not sell any cloud native services externally, you are eligible to join the End User Community. Bear in mind that this excludes vendors, consultancies, training companies.

CNCF provides many opportunities for end users to contribute to the cloud native ecosystem, including getting best practices for your devs and ops, you can work directly with project maintainers, and providing much needed feedback to project developers.

Check out all the articles in this series

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