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OpenStack has shown the world that innovation with open technology can happen. Fast. In fact, it can happen at a pace never before seen in the history of the IT industry.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent explosive growth of cross-cutting open technology initiatives. In particular, this has been welcome news for application developers working on cloud-native application architectures.
Another big step forward in cross-cutting technologies for app devs happened yesterday, with the announcement of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It’s part of the Open Container Project, and it represents yet another exciting milestone in open-source innovation.
With the launch of this new foundation, it’s important to step back and gather some perspective about how all these new pieces fit together. Often, it can seem as though there’s overlap among various open source projects or initiatives, so it’s important to note that this isn’t the case here.
The CNCF and OpenStack are two peas in the same datacenter pod. Specifically, the CNCF:
- Provides a forum for the diverse communities that are each developing their own container management/orchestration approaches. It shows how they can come together and collaboratively solve problems. Open source communities have thousands of brilliant engineers, and it’s a shame to have them duplicating efforts. By coordinating a diverse set of international talent into a well aligned vision, the entire community will benefit in a material way.
- Ensures contributions are consistent with the technical direction being taken by the OpenStack Magnum project. At the same time, this will benefit the OpenStack community by ensuring that our product direction aligns with that of other upstream contributors.
- Aspires to deliver a common approach to container management and orchestration. The result will be that OpenStack integration will be more focused and less complex. this likely yields better performance. For example, OpenStack has a substantial lead among open source projects in dealing with the complexities of multi-vendor storage and networking. This gives the OpenStack community a solid foundation to establish its APIs as we collectively move to further embrace containers.
As both OpenStack contributors and users, we are excited about this important new chapter in the open cloud story. More importantly we are excited at the opportunity to ensure all of these stars in the Open Cloud Galaxy are aligned. Indeed, our IBM Cloud is Open by Design, and IBM views its positioning and advocacy of open technologies as a core positioning platform. Our developers are focusing on precisely this.
Stay tuned over the coming months as the initial efforts from this new announcement begin to materialize. We looking forward to sharing the results, both technologically and ideologically with all.
This post was written for Superuser by Angel Diaz, IBM VP cloud architecture & technology and Jesse Proudman,CTO of Bluebox, an IBM company. Superuser is always looking for good content, email us if you’d like to appear here.
Cover Photo by CIFOR // CC BY NC
