This is a guest blog by Priyanka Sharma, General Manager, Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Arm is a proud platinum member of the CNCF and is an active contributor for many projects under it. We are excited to have Priyanka speak at the upcoming Arm DevSummit, a virtual conference for software and hardware developers. In this blog, Priyanka shares her views on the cloud native space and how the community is coming together to accelerate the adoption and usher in new technology innovations.
Q: Can you give us an overview of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation? Why was it formed and what are its goals?
Priyanka: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation serves as the home for critical components of the global technology infrastructure, starting with the Kubernetes container orchestration project. CNCF was formed to nurture the growth of open-source software, which has grown from a side show several decades ago to now being at the forefront of software innovation around the world. Today, CNCF is the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing open-source projects and brings together the world’s top developers, end users, and vendors. CNCF is a community of doers building modern, end user driven software. We are positioned to bolster cross-company collaboration and interoperability with our neutral IP zone, rich contributor programs, and, most importantly, the trust that end users place in us.
Q: How big is CNCF today?
Priyanka: The CNCF has grown to more than 70 projects. More than 97,000 contributors representing 177 countries have written over 1.3 billion lines of code. We also have more than 580 members and end-user supporters, including Apple, AT&T, JD.com, LinkedIn, Spotify, Verizon Media, and we run the largest open-source developer conferences.
Q: Could you tell us about some of the projects currently under the CNCF umbrella?
Priyanka: CNCF is home for many of the fastest-growing open source projects, including Kubernetes, the technology used to manage clusters of containers that are standardized building blocks of codes, and Prometheus, which provides monitoring for cloud native systems. All told, we have 33 graduated and incubating projects, more than 70 projects total, and are adding new sandbox and incubating projects all the time. Arm recently contributed PARSEC, a project for security at the Edge.
At CNCF, we allow for project experimentation and projects that are competitive and complementary. For example:
Q: Cloud native and containers are enjoying phenomenal growth. What is driving that?
Priyanka: Cloud native starts with cloud computing, and Kubernetes and containers enable the whole process. With containers, organizations build and deploy software differently - it can be shipped faster and resiliently. We have seen a year or two of explosive innovation around all kinds of things, observability, security, and so on, all enabled by the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem. According to our soon to be released Cloud Native Survey for 2020, 92% of respondents are using containers in production, a 300% increase from our first survey in 2016.
Also, according to a report by SlashData prepared for CNCF, there are now 6.5 million cloud native developers around the world, 1.8 million more than in Q2 2019. Of these developers, 2.7 million are using Kubernetes, with many more to come.
We are in the second wave of cloud native now, and it will be a tsunami compared to the first one. Our world has changed, the pandemic has changed it, and end users will be driving it for years to come.
Q: How do you see edge architectures driving change in the coming years? And what changes might these technology changes usher in?
Priyanka: Gartner predicts that by 2025, three-quarters of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge – meaning outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. That’s up from just 10 percent in 2018. That’s a massive jump, and it’ll only get bigger.
There is a huge opportunity to harness the power of cloud native at the edge. As Kubernetes is the de-facto orchestrator for cloud native services we are already seeing it starting to evolve to support edge computing deployments. This is a huge win for the entire industry including companies like Arm in bringing performance and power efficient computing to the edge for software developers.
CNCF just added KubeEdge, an open-source system for extending containerized application orchestration capabilities to hosts at the edge, as an incubating project, and K3s, a certified Kubernetes distribution built for IoT & Edge computing to the CNCF sandbox.
This momentum will push the Kubernetes community into new and exciting areas like IoT, AI, and ML.
Kubernetes was born in massive data centers but Kubernetes will evolve for edge deployments just like Linux did for embedded systems.
I’m very excited to have a special Cameo during the upcoming Arm Developer Summit, and hope you all will tune it!
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