CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, has become a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) Partner under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The CNCF promotes the growth of cloud native open source software through making technology accessible to the open source community and fostering the growth of the ecosystem. They ensure those technologies are unpartisan and technologies’ brands are being used appropriately. CNCF also provides training courses and certifications that deepen the knowledge of the community and allow them to develop common standards and practices.

The KCSP is one of those certifications. This program verifies that a service provider has extensive experience and knowledge of Kubernetes. KCSP enterprises are champions of Kubernetes and have the credentials to support the adoption of the technology in their ecosystem. Any CNCF member enterprise can earn KCSP Partner status after three internal engineers complete and pass the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam, and the business has a model to support other enterprises. KSCP Partners are recognised in the open source community as Kubernetes experts, and will allow their clients to know they are in the best hands possible.

Three engineers at CENGN have completed the exam, making CENGN the second Canadian organization to become certified. CENGN is a Not-For-Profit that helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) overcome their commercialization barriers, through technology validation projects that are hosted on the CENGN testbed. CENGN not only uses Kubernetes to manage internal tools, but also to deploy customer solutions in containerized environments.

Many growing Canadian businesses come to CENGN in order to test their solution’s compatibility with a Kubernetes environment, and with the status of KCSP Partner, CENGN now has the global recognition to back its expertise in delivering Kubernetes services. With this new certification, more Canadian tech companies will be drawn towards CENGN, allowing these businesses to benefit from the resources available through the organization. CENGN sees Cloud Native technology as the future for scalable application delivery and infrastructure abstraction. By being tied directly with CNCF as its certification programs, CENGN can better fulfill its mandate to help commercialization within the Canadian ICT sector.

“Being recognised as KCSP by CNCF is an acknowledgement of CENGN’s capabilities and role in the global Cloud Native ecosystem, helping to foster adoption and best practices,” said Boris Mimeur, CENGN’s VP, Engineering Operations, “It also indicates to prospective members and clients that CENGN is well-equipped to provide services or support on Kubernetes and related Cloud Native technologies.”

CENGN already has a strong history as a contributing partner to CNCF, having been one of the early adopters that advocated for Rook’s graduation from Sandbox to Incubating status. CENGN has been running Rook in production for almost two years, and always runs the latest versions, providing valuable feedback to the developer community. Most recently this involved testing the switch from using FlexVolume drivers to Ceph CSI drivers. CENGN’s Kubernetes environments integrate all the graduated CNCF projects, and also leverage several of the incubating CNCF projects (Rook, Helm, CNI, etcd).

CENGN supports the wider Cloud Native ecosystem as well, speaking at local Cloud Native meetups and Cloud Native Days as well as providing training sessions on the technology. CENGN supports the community through sharing its knowledge on CNI and many different CNI plugins, expertise on providing Ceph storage to Kubernetes using Rook, and other topics.

CENGN looks forward to continuing its strong partnership with CNCF and taking a leading role in facilitating the adoption of open source networking technology in Canada.

CENGN drives technology innovation and industry growth through our test bed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem.

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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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