I’m excited to share that we have just joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Platinum member. CNCF is a part of the Linux Foundation, which helps govern for a wide range of cloud-oriented open source projects, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, containerd, Helm, gRPC, and many others.

Since we joined the Linux Foundation last year, and now have decided to expand that relationship to CNCF membership as a natural next step to invest in open source communities and code at multiple levels, especially in the area of containers. Some specific examples include:

Kubernetes: Microsoft has been contributing code to the Kubernetes project, as well as running Kubernetes as part of the Azure Container Service. Engineering manager and architect Brendan Burns is one of the Kubernetes project maintainers.

Helm: The Helm project was started by Deis before being acquired by Microsoft and continues to be developed and improved by Microsoft engineers. Adam Reese, Michelle Noorali, and Matt Butcher are all project maintainers.

containerd: Microsoft engineers contribute code to expand containerd to Windows Containers; John Howard from the Windows team is one of the project maintainers.

gRPC: A universal, high-performance RPC framework, covering multiple languages such as Node.js, Java, Ruby, Go, and C#, we plan to increase our participation.

Open source is a way to scale software development beyond what any single organization can do. It allows vendors, customers, researchers and others to collaborate and share knowledge about problems and solutions, like no other form of development. And I strongly believe the power of open source derives from strong, diverse communities and that we have an obligation to support these communities by participating as code contributors and in the associated foundations and committees. With all that in mind, I look forward to us working with the other CNCF members (most of whom we already know very well) to help make these projects awesome for everyone.

John Gossman (@gossmanster)