Microsoft Azure Joins Other Cloud Leaders and CNCF Members Google, Alibaba, and IBM to Accelerate Adoption of Cloud Native Technologies

San Francisco – July 26, 2017 – T he Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is sustaining and integrating open source technologies to orchestrate containers as part of a microservices architecture, today announced that Microsoft has joined the CNCF as a platinum member to help further enterprise adoption of cloud native technologies and practices.

“Microsoft is committed to helping organizations of all sizes achieve more, and we see cloud native technologies and open development as a way to enable this,” said Corey Sanders, Partner Director, Microsoft Corp. “We have contributed across many cloud native projects, including Kubernetes, Helm, containerd, and gRPC, and plan to expand our involvement in the future. Joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is another natural step on our open source journey, and we look forward to learning and engaging with the community on a deeper level as a CNCF member.”

Containers are quickly changing the way companies build and deploy their applications. CNCF membership is part of a series of events that mark Microsoft’s growing support for Kubernetes. Following Microsoft’s hire of Brandon Burns, a former Google engineer who co-founded Kubernetes and grew it into one of the most popular open source projects ever, the Kubernetes 1.4 release became a part of Azure Container Service (ACS) in late 2016.

More recently Microsoft deepened its container expertise with the acquisition of Deis and the release of open source project Draft, a process for developing a new application for Kubernetes. Today, in addition to Burns, another dozen Microsoft developers contribute code to Kubernetes. For enterprises hoping to leverage cloud native technologies, Microsoft’s support ensures maximum flexibility and choice to Azure users.

“We are honored to have Microsoft, widely recognized as one of the most important enterprise technology and cloud providers in the world, join CNCF as a platinum member,” said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Their membership, along with other global cloud providers that also belong to CNCF, is a testament to the importance and growth of cloud native technologies. We believe Microsoft’s increasing commitment to open source infrastructure will be a significant asset to the CNCF.”

As part of Microsoft’s Platinum membership, Gabe Monroy, Lead PM for Containers on Microsoft Azure and former Deis CTO, will join CNCF’s Governing Board.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has become one of the biggest open source contributors. The company is currently a leading open source contributor on GitHub, open sourced .NET Core 1.0 and its software development kit, partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10, and works with CNCF member companies like Red Hat, SUSE and others to support their solutions in its products. Microsoft became a platinum member of the Linux Foundation in 2016 and contributes to a number of other Linux Foundation projects, including Node.js Foundation, OpenDaylight, the Open Container Initiative, the R Consortium, and the Open API Initiative.

Additional Resources

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of those software stacks including Kubernetes, Fluentd, Linkerd, Prometheus, OpenTracing, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt and CNI; brings together the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors; and serves as a neutral home for collaboration. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit: https://www.cncf.io/.

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