AWS joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Rumor has it that Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform will soon launch its own Kubernetes-based container management service. Those rumors are getting a bit more concrete because AWS today joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open source home of the Kubernetes project, as a top-level Platinum member. With this, all of the major public cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google and IBM, are now part of this Linux Foundation-based group, which aims to bring modern cloud management techniques to the masses.

Amazon already hosts the vast majority of Kubernetes deployments, according to a recent survey, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Amazon is joining the foundation that, to a large degree, is steering this project. It’s worth noting, though, that AWS makes use of plenty of open source projects, and also regularly releases its own projects on GitHub. The company also has been a Linux Foundation member since 2013 and is a founding member of the Core Infrastructure Initiative. Unlike all of its main competitors, it isn’t a member of the Cloud Foundry foundation, though.

As for the CNCF, Amazon has been contributing to containerd, the group’s container runtime. “AWS plans to take an active role in the cloud native community, contributing to Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies such as containerd, CNI, and linkerd,” the CNCF notes in today’s announcement. Adrian Cockcroft, the VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, will join CNCF’s board.

In his announcement, Cockcroft did not talk about what Amazon’s short-term plans for Kubernetes are, but given the wide-spread support for the platform — which is giving Google and Microsoft an opening in competing with AWS on this quickly expanding field — I would be surprised if we didn’t see increased direct support for Kubernetes on AWS (you can, of course, already use it on AWS, but only with the help of tools from third-party vendors).