Oracle joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a platinum member

Oracle today announced that it is joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member. With this move, it’s joining companies like Amazon, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and RedHat as the top sponsors for the Linux Foundation-based group that’s the home of the Kubernetes container orchestration project and related tools.

Membership in the CNCF isn’t cheap. Platinum members pay $370,000 for their membership (with a discount for existing Linux Foundation members), so joining the foundation is a clear sign that a company is backing the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Indeed, Oracle isn’t just joining the foundation but also bringing Kubernetes to Oracle Linux and open sourcing its Terraform Kubernetes installer for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It’s worth noting that Oracle had already made a number of contributions to Kubernetes and related container tooling, so in many ways, today’s move only formalizes its existing investment in the ecosystem.

“Oracle has decades of experience meeting the needs of world-class enterprises,” said Chris
Aniszczyk, chief operating officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, in a canned statement. “We are excited to have Oracle join CNCF as a platinum member, and believe that their key role will help define the future of enterprise cloud.”

At this point, there really can’t be any doubt that Kubernetes is winning the container orchestration wars, given that virtually every major player is now backing the project, both financially and with code contributions.

In addition to announcing Oracle as a new member, the CNCF also today announced its first set of Kubernetes certified service providers that have shown deep knowledge of the container orchestrator to help enterprises adopt it (the providers are Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Canonical, CoreOS, Giant Swarm and Samsung SDS).

The group is also adding two new projects to its stable of open source tools: Jaeger, a distributed tracing system, and Envoy, an edge and service proxy from the development team at Lyft.

Oracle, too, made another open source announcement today: the company is going to move the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform, which was previously closed source, into the Eclipse Foundation and the code is now on GitHub.

Featured Image: Paul Sakuma/AP