CNCF

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a nonprofit organization within the Linux Foundation that coordinates the development and governance of cloud-native technologies. Its mission is to advance cloud-native computing by fostering open-source projects, standards, and a collaborative ecosystem for developers, operators, and vendors.

Founded in 2015, CNCF brought together multiple cloud-native initiatives. Google donated Kubernetes to CNCF that year, establishing it as the flagship project. Since then, CNCF has grown to host a wide range of projects such as Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, Fluentd, Jaeger, and OpenTelemetry, among others, and it co-sponsors the annual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conferences.

Governance and maturity: Projects enter a maturity path from Sandbox to Incubating to Graduated, based on governance, stability, and community activity. The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership and oversight, while End User and Special Interest Groups advise on user needs and cross-cutting issues.

Ecosystem and programs: CNCF maintains a landscape map of cloud-native projects and runs programs aimed at interoperability, security, and best practices. It provides governance guidelines, conformance and security initiatives, and resources to help projects scale and collaborate.

Impact and funding: CNCF projects underpin container orchestration, service mesh, observability, data processing, and cloud-native storage across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments. The foundation is funded by corporate members and sponsors, with a tiered membership model that includes vendors, end users, and ecosystem partners.