By: Boris Mimeur, Director of Engineering Operations, CENGN

For IT infrastructure managers, the growing pace of cloud computing is hard to ignore. Operating in the software industry or not, organizations are integrating cloud native technologies into their IT strategy to deliver better services to their customers. Companies are shifting their infrastructure architectures to a software-defined approach for automation, resiliency, and scalability of the products they’re building. So, what is cloud native? Cloud native refers to the software-defined approach of how applications are deployed and managed. Using a microservices architecture and containerization, cloud native technologies empower organizations to offer scalable and portable services that operate independent of one another. In addition, operations are simplified through continuous integration that allows DevOps teams to build, test, and release software without affecting the end user.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is enabling organizations to adopt technologies as companies make the transition to cloud computing. CNCF is a community of members, contributors, and projects that provide organizations access to cutting-edge tools and technologies. Started as a project from the Linux Foundation, CNCF was created in 2015 to support and promote the use of managing applications in a containerized architecture. CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, CNI, Rook, and many others have created a global community of organizations that are able to utilize and implement SDN solutions into modern application deployments.

Today, over 280 members stand with the CNCF, including many CENGN members and partners like Cisco, Huawei, Juniper Networks, Nokia, Canonical, and CloudOps. The foundation also has members from public cloud providers like AWS and Azure to end users such as Nasdaq, Salesforce, and Adidas. The rapid growth of CNCF in the past year is a remarkable sign of the increased support from the cloud native community. This has progressed several CNCF projects in the areas of orchestration, monitoring, logging, and service meshing. The first project to graduate from CNCF and arguably its most notable is Kubernetes, a production-grade container orchestration system which has been the fastest growing open source project last year. According to Redmonk, 71% of Fortune 100 companies use containers and over 50% of these companies have implemented Kubernetes.

CNCF projects have allowed CENGN to stay on the front-line of innovative technology, specifically containerization orchestration, as our infrastructure utilizes projects like Kubernetes, Calico, Flannel, Weave, and most recently Tungsten Fabric. These new technologies allow us to contribute to projects critical to CENGN’s ecosystem and improve our infrastructure services and technical support to our client companies. We look forward to continuing to embrace the technologies coming from CNCF and working closer with the foundation.

Interested in learning more about cutting-edge technologies? October 23-25 CENGN, in partnership with CloudOps, is providing a Docker & Kubernetes Workshop – CNI Edition. Click here for more details and registration.

Don’t miss the CENGN Summit happening on November 27th in Kanata, ON. Click here for more details and to register.

About the Author

CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.

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