A decade of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
First came the cloud, then came containers, and then container orchestration came along, and nothing would ever be the same.
Back in the 1990s, the Internet had matured enough that companies began to offer software services over it. Those early efforts were called Application Service Providers (ASP). They failed. Their Achilles’ heel was using multiple instances of third-party client-server applications on bare-metal or virtual machines (VMs). They couldn’t scale. Their more successful successors, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, starting with Salesforce in 1999, developed their own applications and operated a multi-tenant infrastructure model, which could scale.
It wasn’t easy. Many other companies tried to follow Salesforce’s lead and were unsuccessful. Three other advances had to come before SaaS would become today’s default way to deliver software services.
The first of these was the cloud. Again, earlier versions existed, but the fundamental transformation began when Amazon Web Services (AWS) started offering cloud services in 2002. Now, companies could focus on their programs rather than infrastructure.
However, VMs, while useful, weren’t as flexible or cost-effective as SaaS needed. The answer? Containers. Again, containers, in the form of FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, were old tech. But it wasn’t until Docker made it easy to create and manage containers on Linux in 2013 that today’s cloud services really took flight. Container-deployed applications were much more flexible and inexpensive than VMs.
There was, however, one last problem to resolve: “How do you manage containers?” Briefly, several contenders emerged for the container orchestrator role, but the winner would prove to be Kubernetes.
The container revolution: From Docker to Kubernetes
The Kubernetes story began in the early 2010s at Google, where engineers were already grappling with the challenges of managing large-scale containerized applications. You see, even before Docker ignited the container revolution, Google had been using containers internally and orchestrating them with the Borg task scheduler.
Three Google engineers persuaded the company to open-source Borg. One of them, Craig McLuckie, told me, “We always believed that open-sourcing Kubernetes was the right way to go, bringing many benefits to the project. … We were able to work with lots of great engineers, many of whom really understood the needs of businesses that would benefit from deploying containers. It was a virtuous cycle.”
He was right.
That did not, however, mean that Kubernetes was an immediate success. At the first DockerCon in June 2014, many other orchestrators were announced, including Apache Mesos, Red Hat’s GearD, Docker Swarm, and Facebook’s Tupperware. As Brad Rydzewski, Drone.io‘s founder, said then: “What I learned at Dockercon: Everyone is building their own orchestration platform. Seriously. Everyone.”
Building the foundation: CNCF unites the cloud-native ecosystem
It was this diversity of orchestration programs that would help inspire the birth of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). People believed that technology unification was necessary for cloud-native computing to take off. The proto-CNCF decided that Kubernetes was at the CNCF’s heart when Google decided to not only open-source the project but to donate it to the foundation in July 2015.
That isn’t to say that there would be no competition, far from it! Today, there are more than 120 CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions and as many managed Kubernetes services offered globally. These vendor-neutral, standardized technologies power today’s cloud.
The CNCF was never just Google’s show. A remarkable coalition of tech giants, including Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Docker, VMware, and others, backed the CNCF. The founding principle was to unite key industry players and open-source developers under a neutral governance model. This would then accelerate cloud-native infrastructure innovation for everyone.
CNCF wasted no time expanding its scope. By mid-2016, Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, became its second hosted project. This provided the backbone of metrics for cloud-native apps. OpenTracing followed soon after, marking CNCF’s commitment to distributed tracing and microservices observability. Fluentd, Linkerd, and other early projects rapidly joined.
In 2017, the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee introduced a structured maturity model–sandbox, incubating, graduated–to guide project adoption and advancement.
Another major development came when Docker donated containerd, its core container runtime, to the CNCF in 2017. Within two years, CNCF had signed over 100 member companies. Everyone was going cloud native.
The real proof that Kubernetes would be the future came when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in June 2018. With the world’s largest cloud provider onboard, Kubernetes was solidly in the driver’s seat.
A decade of growth: From Kubernetes to AI-native development
By 2018, CNCF had emerged as the global epicenter of cloud-native technology. Critical milestones included Kubernetes graduating as the first CNCF project in March 2018, and Prometheus graduating in August, establishing itself as the de facto monitoring solution, with Envoy quickly following in November to bring high-performance service proxies into the fold.
An array of new major projects entered incubation. These all broadened CNCF’s influence from orchestration to storage, networking, and security. By the close of 2019, CNCF had dozens of projects powering real-world production systems globally. Today, the CNCF has over 200 open-source cloud-native projects under its wing.
To train new developers and keep everyone on the same page, the CNCF launched KubeCon, its annual trade show. Today, there are KubeCons around the globe with thousands of attendees. Lately, as programmers have gotten up to speed, the show’s focus has switched to business and technology wheeling and dealing. Even now, though, KubeCon remains the largest dedicated open-source software show. For example, there were over 9 thousand people at the 2025 KubeCon North America in Atlanta.
The COVID-19 pandemic did not slow CNCF. Indeed, it helped speed up. The remote infrastructure boom accelerated cloud-native demand. More projects were added, and many more graduated. These included Harbor (registry), Helm (package manager), Jaeger (tracing), Rook (storage), and Linkerd (service mesh). CNCF also embraced new frontiers with WebAssembly (Envoy’s SDK) and CloudEvents (serverless.
The next major event in the CNCF’s ongoing growth was when the OpenInfra Foundation joined forces with the LF. OpenInfra brings its five major cloud-native programs into the CNCF fold in 2025. These include OpenStack, the world’s most widely deployed open-source cloud platform; Kata Containers: an open-source container runtime that combines lightweight VMs with containers; StarlingX, a comprehensive edge cloud software stack; Zuul: A continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform; and Airship, declarative cloud provisioning tools. All significant cloud-native programs are now under the CNCF roof.
Today, CNCF hosts more than 200 projects, supported by nearly 800 member organizations, from the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies to over 200 startups. As of 2025, the CNCF projects have more than 270-thousand individual contributors worldwide. Simultaneously, the CNCF’s certification programs produced tens of thousands of practitioners, further embedding cloud-native principles into enterprise IT.
It’s hard to overstate CNCF’s influence. The CNCF projects formed the default stack for cloud-native infrastructure. If you’re doing anything on the cloud, you’re using CNCF software.
As CNCF’s ambassador, Dotan Horovits, said. “CNCF has always been more than a collection of tools—it’s a movement shaped by collaboration, openness, and shared passion for building the future of software… I’m excited to see how the next decade of cloud native innovation unfolds.” As are we all.
Tomorrow, predicted CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk declared, “Cloud native and AI-native development are merging, and it’s really an incredible place we’re in right now.”
Yes, yes it is. It will be interesting indeed to see where the CNCF, AI, and the new cloud world it helped invent will go.
