Here’s insights from more of our members AppFormix CEO, Sumeet Singh; Cisco Intercloud Services CTO, Ken Owens; Twistlock Chief Strategy Officer, Chenxi Wang; and Weaveworks COO, Mathew Lodge, on why they joined CNCF and their own work to advance cloud native computing. You’ll find many of them on the road and happy to talk about the future of CNCF.
1. How do you see the CNCF furthering adoption of cloud native?
Singh, AppFormix: The critical question is how do we make it easier for cloud operators to deliver the level of performance that application developers and end users expect. There are lots of challenges to delivering that in a microservices world. CNCF can be a rallying point for companies and individuals with great ideas on how to give cloud operators the tools they need to succeed in a cloud native world.
Owens, Cisco: CNCF will help to define cloud native (architecture, reference design, taxonomy) and how software patterns are evolving toward cloud. Additionally, CNCF will include a common set of tools to further cloud native adoption.
Wang, Twistlock: CNCF, as an open source foundation, should represent different points of view. We think CNCF will provide guidance to the industry and also help to smooth out disparate views and approaches going forward.
Lodge, Weaveworks: There’s a lot of confusion among users about how to move to cloud native architectures and container-based deployments. The vendor space is very noisy, and it’s hard to figure out how all the pieces fit together. The CNCF has the opportunity to simplify that and accelerate cloud-native adoption.
2. Why did you join CNCF?
Singh, AppFormix: It’s a VM and container world, at least for the foreseeable future. In that vein, our customers need answers to both of those compute philosophies, and they don’t have the resources or patience to manage multiple control interfaces to get there. Achieving this means working with CNCF, OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes, and Linux communities.
Owens, Cisco: We strongly believe that cloud native is the next data center and service provider operating model. We want to ensure that the current state of the application developer and the problems they face in moving to cloud native are represented. Having developed and deployed cloud native transformations, we bring this working experience to the community.
Wang, Twistlock: We like the mission and we believe it’s important that different companies come together to work on this industry-significant initiative. We also will bring a security voice in the CNCF.
Lodge, Weaveworks: We believe strongly that open source software is a great way to enable customers to go faster while retaining control of their own destiny. Given the large number of vendors in the cloud-native space, the CNCF can be more of a neutral ground for both guidance and running code in the open source projects that are housed within the CNCF. That benefits everyone, and it provides a way for big and small vendors to contribute.
3. What advice would you give other companies looking to join CNCF?
Singh, AppFormix: The reality is that companies join open source projects either because the code and the relationships help them build commercial solutions, or because they consume the code from those projects in their in-house solutions. Either way, they are users who want to engage upstream. Joining CNCF means that you’ve made a strategic decision that the success of your organization relies to one degree or another on having a voice in how microservices architectures are built and deployed at scale.
Owens, Cisco: Companies should consider joining CNCF if it is important to encourage the community to solve the real-world issues they are trying to solve. Additionally, if the access to the community, tools, and lab environment are critical to their business success, they should get involved.
Wang, Twistlock: To be effective, you have to participate and put in the time. If you become part of the CNCF, the biggest thing is be ready to invest your time and be part of the conversation. If you are passionate about something, drive that initiative within CNCF.
Lodge, Weaveworks: For end users, it gives you the opportunity to get in at the ground floor and help shape the future of cloud-native computing and container technologies. For vendors, it’s a way to collaborate and work productively with other vendors to serve bigger end user requirements. That helps grow the overall “pie” of commercial opportunity in a way that also serves the end users.
4. What can people expect to see from your company at upcoming conferences in 2016?
Singh, AppFormix: We recently announced at Openstack Summit, how AppFormix and Rackspace are working together to substantially improve the performance of microservice based architectures. Read more about our announcement here.
Owens, Cisco: We will be attending multiple shows over the next several months; including recently spoke at Openstack Summit on containers with OpenStack and CNCF ability to help Openstack, focusing on CNCF and DC/OS early developments at MesosCon, talking about cloud native journey and how CNCF helps at OSCON, and presenting on CNCF scope and charter, as well as provided an overview of cloud native integrations between Cisco and Joyent at Container Summit.
Additionally, we will focus on the cloud native journey and how CFF and CNCF are working together at Cloud Foundry Summit, talking about enterprise cloud native use cases and how OCI and CNCF are working together at DockerCon, discussing K8S and CNCF efforts esp around tools at DevNation, and promoting CNCF awareness and cloud native transformation use cases related to CNCF at ContainerCon.
Cisco Live US is coming up in July and sessions will include cloud native, enterprise, service providers (NFV), and IoT use cases to name just a few. We plan to have a CNCF focus with customers that have joined the foundation.
Wang, Twistlock: We’ll have a number of releases and announcements this year. DockerCon, AWS Re:Invent, Container Summit, and DevOps Enterprise Summit are the main conferences we plan to participate in and will try to align with CNCF opportunities at the shows.
Lodge, Weaveworks:
Weaveworks’ Weave Net has seen incredible growth and continues to solve difficult container networking problems in simple ways, and we’re also seeing strong interest in Weave Scope for its intuitive visual approach to developing and running microservices in cloud-native environments. We’ll be showing how customers like ISE and Kiva.org are putting the two together to form a flexible, easy to understand “invisible infrastructure” for cloud-native microservices and applications.