Apple signs up as a platinum member of Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Apple has thrown its container cards on the table by joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is the home of open source technologies such as Kubernetes.

With that platinum membership, Apple's Tom Doron, senior engineering manager, has joined CNCF’s Governing Board. The membership also means that Apple has joined the Linux Foundation as well.

According to the CNCF's press release, Apple "has long been a pioneer in cloud native computing and one of the earlier adopters of container technology."

"Apple joining the CNCF makes sense given that it runs a large-scale cloud infrastructure, and is already using and contributing to some of the major CNCF projects including Kubernetes, gRPC, and Prometheus," said AvidThink founder and principal Roy Chua, in an email to FierceTelecom. "Like the other well-known CNCF members such as SalesForce, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, it seems a logical step for Apple to join."

Chua added, "From job listings on major career and social media sites, it's clear that they've been recruiting talent with Kubernetes expertise and when a site-reliability engineering (SRE) role at Apple requires a Kubernetes expert, it's likely they already have it running at some reasonable scale internally."

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In typical fashion for the company, Apple wasn't available for comment on its CNCF membership, but the CNCF is excited about what Apple brings to the table.  

“Having a company with the experience and scale of Apple as an end user member is a huge testament to the vitality of cloud native computing for the future of infrastructure and application development,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to have the support of Apple, and look forward to the future contributions to the broader cloud native project community.”

With its CNCF membership, Apple is also member of the broader Linux Foundation open source community.