Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced this week that it joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This is a sign of its support for open-source and cloud-native technologies.
An offshoot of the Linux Foundation, the CNCF incubates open source projects that are based on cloud-native computing technologies, which the group describes as having three characteristics: containerized, dynamically orchestrated and microservices-oriented.
The CNCF currently hosts ten projects, including Containerd and Rkt container runtime engines, the Prometheus open-source monitoring toolkit, CoreDNS server, and, notably the Kubernetes container managing platform.
AWS has become a platinum member in the CNCF as of this week. This is in addition to tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google. Adrian Cockcroft (head of cloud architecture at AWS) will join the CNCF as an additional board member.
Cockcroft joined AWS last summer after having worked previously at Netflix. He was responsible for overseeing the company’s long-running migration to AWS. Cockcroft wrote Wednesday in a blog that the migration of Netflix’s operations from Netflix to AWS was based on many cloud-native computing principles. These included a focus on “on demand delivery, global deployment and elasticity” as well as a focus on “on -demand delivery, elasticity and higher-level services.”
“In 2009, I was working for Netflix. The engineering teams were creating new patterns of application architecture to migrate to AWS. Some of us had gained experience at Yahoo, Google, and eBay in automating deployments at scale. We also received new ideas from Werner Vogels, [Amazon.com’s CTO], and the AWS team. We incorporated these new assumptions into our architecture. Cockcroft wrote that in 2010 we began to talk publicly about cloud migration and that the bulk of the platform was released as a collection of open-source projects, collectively known under the name NetflixOSS.
“We didn’t invent many of these patterns but the fact that we gathered them into an architecture, applied it at scale and discussed it in public and shared the code was influential in helping to define what is often referred as cloud native architectures.”
According to the CNCF announcement, Kubernetes was identified as one of AWS’s projects that it plans to contribute as a member. AWS does have its own container management offering, the Amazon EC2 Container Services, which was launched in late 2014. However, there are reports that the company plans to expand to the Google-backed Kubernetes platform.
Cockcroft cited a CNCF poll in which almost two-thirds of respondents have Kubernetes running on AWS.
He wrote that “We have plans to increase Kubernetes blog posts, code contributions, and believe there are opportunities for existing and future AWS open-source projects to be incubated at CNCF.”
0