Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced joining Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Platinum member.
The news broke out exactly two weeks after its arch competitor Microsoft made news by signing up with CNCF as a platinum member.
By making this move, AWS confirms its commitment to support open-source projects that help developers build applications and easily run them on AWS or other supporting cloud platforms.
“As the largest cloud provider, AWS brings years of experience in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing and enormous expertise in cloud native technologies,” said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
He added further, “We are honored to have AWS join CNCF as a platinum member, and believe that their participation will help shape the future of enterprise computing.”
Furthermore, AWS’ vice-president for cloud architecture – Adrian Cockcroft, will be joining the CNCF governing board.
The CNCF manages open-source container orchestration product – Kubernetes, which has now become a de facto standard for managing containerized software development environments. It also supports other projects like Prometheus, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, Containerd, Rkt and CNI.
Both Microsoft and AWS will be paying an annual fee of $350,000 to manage their seat on the board. It will give these companies some say in deciding the path taken for different projects at CNCF.
AWS was already running its own container orchestrator – Amazon EC2 container. Now, it will be seen supporting Kubernetes as well. A survey by CNCF also proved that 63% of customers were already running Kubernetes on AWS.
Reportedly, the company was also planning to develop its own service based on Kubernetes.
AWS was the last amongst its rivals like Google, IBM, Huawei, Microsoft and 11 others to join CNCF. By extending support to Kubernetes, these cloud providers make it easier for their customers to shift from one platform to another.
