We recently announced ChaoSuan, Crunchy Data, Qbox, StorageOS, and Treasure Data have joined our efforts to accelerate the adoption of cloud native technologies and advance the open source ecosystem.
ChaoSuan CEO, Alex Yang; Crunchy Data CEO Bob Laurence; Qbox Co-Founder and CEO, Mark Brandon; StorageOS Co-Founder and CEO Chris Brandon; and Treasure Data CEO, Hiro Yoshikawa, shared with us why they joined the Foundation and their work to advance cloud native computing. You’ll find many of them at LinuxCon, CloudNativeDay, CloudNativeCon, KubeCon, PromCon and ContainerCon in the coming months, excited to discuss their reasons for joining CNCF and their experiences with the project.
1. Why did you become a member of CNCF?
Yang, ChaoSuan: We believe cloud native innovation is the future of cloud computing, and we look forward to working together closely with the CNCF community to continue advancing the adoption and development of cloud native technologies. Joining CNCF will ensure that ChaoSuan stays apprised of state-of-the-art cloud application developments throughout the industry, so that we always provide the most advanced, cutting-edge solutions to our clients.
Laurence, Crunchy Data: Crunchy Data, a leading provider of trusted 100 percent open source PostgreSQL and enterprise PostgreSQL support, technology and training, is enabling PostgreSQL for cloud native architectures. Combining the agility provided by cloud native with the power of the most advanced open source database will allow organizations to build new innovation as never before. We joined CNCF to help advance the adoption and maturity of cloud native architectures based on containers and microservices. Crunchy Data believes that these technologies have real potential to accelerate innovation for any organization.
Brandon, Qbox: DevOps is our core competency, Qbox has been running a hosted Elasticsearch business since 2013. As the creators of Supergiant – an open source datacenter management system based on Kubernetes – we felt that joining CNCF would be an opportunity to both support the platform so crucial to our development and gain insight into its roadmap.
Brandon, StorageOS: Our vision is to give developers and enterprises total control of their own storage environment with agile, on-demand storage anywhere – easily and securely. Standardizing container storage and offering agile storage gives developers freedom to innovate. StorageOS joined the CNCF because of the leadership it provides to the cloud technology ecosystem and operations market. Its mission to harmonize emerging technologies and foster innovation in the container market aligns perfectly with our vision at StorageOS. Through joining CNCF, our aim is to help the industry understand the role storage plays in these new technologies and deliver solutions that are well integrated and easy to use.
Yoshikawa, Treasure Data: Treasure Data is the original creator and primary sponsor of Fluentd, the open source log collector. For us, joining CNCF is the natural logical step in demonstrating our commitment and continued partnership with cloud native software like Kubernetes, Prometheus and Docker.
Prometheus has been one of the popular destinations for Fluentd for some time. In fact, one of the active co-users of Prometheus and Fluentd wrote a Fluentd output plugin (link) for Prometheus enabling Prometheus users to collect data from dozens of different data sources and data formats via Fluentd.
Fluentd and Kubernetes have began working together for almost two years. Fluentd, is the default logging agent for Kubernetes (link). Our collaboration with Kubernetes is one of the reasons why Fluentd was one of the first to be supported on Docker’s Logging Driver API.
2. Why is cloud native important to your company?
Yang, ChaoSuan: ChaoSuan aims to provide the most efficient, high-quality enterprise solutions. As cloud innovation is advancing rapidly and has become the de facto DevOps model, adoption of cloud native technology will significantly improve the quality of our services while reducing operational costs for customers.
Laurence, Crunchy Data: Cloud native is important to Crunchy Data because we recognize that organizations leveraging cloud native architectures will be able to realize the inherent agility and flexibility enabled through the use of containers and microservices and thereby accelerate innovation and meet ever-increasing customer demands. Crunchy Data is leading the way in the effort to bring the PostgreSQL database into the cloud native world. Crunchy Data is investing heavily in establishing PostgreSQL as a first-class citizen in a containerized environment. Leveraging containers and microservices to run and manage PostgreSQL instances will allow organizations to leverage the most advanced open source database in their cloud native application architectures.
Brandon, Qbox: In 2015, Qbox switched from using virtual machines (VMs) to cloud native technology and the result was powerful. We saw a 50 percent decrease in our AWS costs, along with improved performance of our hosted Elasticsearch service and fewer support tickets. Our discovery was so eye opening that we packaged our hand-rolled datacenter management system, attached an Apache 2 license and put it out on Github for open source use.
Brandon, StorageOS: Cloud native applications need to function in a world where storage management is simple and access is ubiquitous. To achieve this, these applications require access to data in any location in which it resides and the capability to move this data securely. At StorageOS, our mission is to deliver a persistent, cloud native storage platform that helps make applications portable and secure without hardware or cloud provider lock-in.
Yoshikawa, Treasure Data: Treasure Data believes that data collection across disparate systems is the single biggest problem that big data and analytics face today. Traditionally, data collection has been a major bottleneck for businesses to use because legacy systems and application deployment models weren’t built to make it easy to collect data. The way to solve this problem is to modernize how applications are deployed, but also to ensure that the new generation of applications collect data in a uniform way; significantly simplifying the process of data collection, instrumentation, and management.
Logging and data collection are a first-class citizen in the cloud native world, and open source tools like Fluentd, Embulk and MessagePack make it easier to collect and transport data uniformly at scale. If more companies embrace the cloud native approach, it will mean more applications will be deployed in a data collection friendly way.
3. As part of your membership, how does your company plan to get involved with the Foundation?
Yang, ChaoSuan: Aside from regular participation in CNCF meetings and discussions, ChaoSuan plans to allocate additional resources to further the development of future incubated projects.
Laurence, Crunchy Data: We plan to become actively involved in CNCF efforts around supporting databases and storage within cloud native architectures. Crunchy Data’s mission is to help organizations accelerate innovation and success by leveraging the most advanced and cost-effective open source object-relational database platform as the foundation for their application infrastructures. Crunchy Data is investing in technologies and best practices that will allow PostgreSQL to be used in modern application architectures. Leveraging containers and microservices to run and manage PostgreSQL instances will allow organizations to leverage the most advanced open source database in their cloud native application architectures.
Brandon, Qbox: Qbox looks forward to contributing to the development of Kubernetes, especially as it relates to administering stateful, distributed apps. We also look forward to participating in CloudNativeDay, CloudNativeCon, and community events as an official CNCF member to help spread awareness of the project’s mission.
Brandon, StorageOS: StorageOS is creating white papers describing best practices for deploying and managing simple-to-use, cost-effective storage that is highly portable across physical, virtual and cloud devices. Lastly, following our beta launch this month, we will donate a StorageOS Kubernetes plugin to the open source community as the Kubernetes community is essential to our strategy.
Yoshikawa, Treasure Data: In the future, data will be used more effectively to run and grow business and data management in cloud native environments will play a key part as the amount of data grows. As part of our CNCF membership, we look forward to partnering with other members via technology integration and partnership to build an open ecosystem where tools can be plugged into each other and encourage community participation. We look forward to additional contributions to Fluentd from the open source community. Fluentd has over 300 plugins, with less than 20 written by Treasure Data. Additionally, we plan to attend and sponsor Docker and Kubernetes related events such as DockerCon, KubeCon, CloudNativeDay, and CloudNativeCon to name a few.