Why Cloud Native Is About Community
Cloud native is really only as good as the support and input the community provides. It is in this spirit that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) continues to invest heavily in the community to support new and existing projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy that are among the cornerstones of cloud native today.
During this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, held live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon last month, CNCF Marketing Manager Bill Mulligan and CNCF Developer Advocate Ihor Dvoretskyi spoke of the CNCF’s Cloud Native Credits and Kubernetes Community Day program, as well as why these and other initiatives, are vital to building cloud native tools and infrastructure of today and in the future.
Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.
With support from Equinix Metal, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and GitHub, the Cloud Credits program was created to help create a framework for companies that donate resources for CNCF projects in the form of credits.
Why Cloud Native Is About Community
“We’ve been doing this for years, but, finally, we needed to have this as a programmatic solution, where every single project can apply to use these solutions and these credits, and every single company that can offer us something does not need to reach out to us directly asking ‘what can we do?’” Dvoretskyi said. “They now have a magic button on our website, where they can just fill out a brief form and provide us with some data that will persist later and figure out how the company can be useful.”
Created in 2019, Kubernetes Community Days are community-organized events held around the world. The CNCF organizes the events to help foster teaching, collaboration and networking among those in the open source and cloud native community to support the adoption of Kubernetes.
A major aspect of Kubernetes Community Days is how the events are geared for international participants, and are multilingual. With 20 scheduled to take place this year, the events have taken or will shortly take place in El Salvador, China, India, Spain, South Korea and in Australia.
“The Kubernetes community day program is a really exciting thing that is enabling people to build their cloud native community in their local area. So you can think of them maybe as like mini KubeCons organized in a specific city or a specific country, that are really localized to what the community there is interested in and even maybe localized to language,” Mulligan said. “KubeCon is great, but there are only three that happen per year, and they can only take place in certain large metros, because of limitations on the conference venue size. These case Community Days programs allow us to expand into new geographies, and go to different areas, and even in different languages, too.”
