The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is one of the projects hosted by the Linux Foundation . CNCF aims to accelerate the adoption of containers, microservices, and cloud-native applications.
CNCF hosts a multitude of projects, with more to be added in the future. CNCF provides resources to each of the projects, but, at the same time, each project continues to operate independently under its pre-existing governance structure and with its existing maintainers. Projects within CNCF are categorized based on achieved status: Sandbox, Incubating, and Graduated. At the time of this writing, a dozen projects had reached Graduated status with many more Incubating and in the Sandbox.
Graduated projects:
- Kubernetes for container orchestration
- Prometheus for monitoring
- Envoy for service mesh
- CoreDNS for service discovery
- containerd for container runtime
- Fluentd for logging
- Harbor for registry
- Helm for package management
- Vitess for cloud-native storage
- Jaeger for distributed tracing
- TUF for software updates
- TiKV for key/value store
Incubating projects:
- CRI-O for container runtime
- Linkerd for service mesh
- Contour for ingress
- etcd for key/value store
- gRPC for remote procedure call (RPC)
- CNI for networking API
- Rook for cloud-native storage
- Notary for security
- NATS for messaging
- OpenTracing for distributed tracing
- Open Policy Agent for policy
- And many more .
There are many projects in the CNCF Sandbox geared towards metrics, monitoring, identity, scripting, serverless, nodeless, edge, expecting to achieve Incubating and possibly Graduated status. While many active projects are preparing for takeoff, others are being archived once they become less active. The first archived project is the rkt container runtime.
The projects under CNCF cover the entire lifecycle of a cloud-native application, from its execution using container runtimes, to its monitoring and logging. This is very important to meet the goals of CNCF.
For Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation:
- Provides a neutral home for the Kubernetes trademark and enforces proper usage
- Provides license scanning of core and vendor code
- Offers legal guidance on patent and copyright issues
- Creates open source learning curriculum, training, and certification for both Kubernetes administrators (CKA) and application developers (CKAD)
- Manages a software conformance working group
- Actively markets Kubernetes
- Supports ad hoc activities
- Sponsors conferences and meetup events.