The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation founded in 2015 that serves as a vendor-neutral home for cloud-native open-source projects. The foundation hosts and provides support, oversight, and direction for critical components of modern cloud infrastructure, including flagship projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and dozens of other tools focused on container orchestration, microservices, observability, service meshes, and application delivery. CNCF brings together the world’s top developers, end users, and vendors—including major public cloud providers, enterprise software companies, and innovative startups—to collaborate on advancing cloud-native technologies. The foundation organizes these projects into three maturity levels: Sandbox (early-stage projects being evaluated), Incubating (growing projects gaining adoption), and Graduated (mature, widely-adopted projects that have demonstrated sustained development and production use).
CNCF’s mission is to make cloud-native computing ubiquitous by fostering a robust ecosystem of tools that help organizations build, scale, and secure modern, containerized applications. Beyond hosting projects, the foundation plays a pivotal role in shaping industry standards and best practices through working groups and special interest groups (SIGs) that develop guidelines, policy frameworks, and hardening standards. CNCF also enhances workforce readiness through certifications such as the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS), ensuring consistent skills development across the industry. The foundation runs major conferences like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, which serve as gathering points for the cloud-native community to exchange ideas, share innovations, and drive the industry forward.
Website - https://www.cncf.io/