With the expansion of cloud services and container-based operations continuing to make their importance known across more and more fields of industry, the companies that provide ways of managing those two burgeoning technologies are finding customer interest growing beyond just an urge to have the newest tech at their disposal.

At KubeCon 2016 in Seattle, WA, Mathew Lodge, COO of Weaveworks Inc. and governing board member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, sat down with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the role of Kubernetes at the CNCF, the outlook for its developments and insights into Weaveworks’ view of open source.

Humble beginnings

As the conversation began, Lodge looked back at the early days of Kubernetes, the open-source container cluster management software project by Google. Lodge noted how Google “wanted Kubernetes to be a true community and not just a Google thing” and the need it saw to distinguish CNCF from the numerous other open-source foundations.

“I think what’s different about cloud-native computing is it’s a way of delivering that kind of agility that people are looking for and essentially doing computing in a new way,” Lodge noted. “It’s more of an organizational shift down to smaller teams, developing micro-services. And so [CNCF] was a way of building a community around that idea, which is bigger than just Kubernetes itself.”

Success seeking

Asked what he saw as being some critical success factors for CNCF’s involvement with users and the community at large, Lodge highlighted visible usage of the projects as “the big one,” noting, “If we are adopting and enabling and incubating the right projects at the CNCF, we should see that reflected in adoption.”

The rising number of jobs mentioning Kubernetes skillsets was an encouraging sign to him that things are on-track, as is its outpacing of similar services, with Cloud Foundry named as an example competitor in that realm.

As the engagement of various industries with container-based solutions continues to grow, Lodge anticipates that the users will come to recognize the importance of streamlining their management. “Once you start out with containers, then you eventually realize that you need an automated way to manage this, schedule all these different containers and deal with your services,” he stated.

Weaves and open power

Lodge also shared some information on how things are going over at Weaveworks, with a scaled-out version of Cloud Foundry’s Prometheus utility set to become “the core of a new offering that’s going to be part of our Weave Cloud service.” He attributed its choice of Prometheus to its being designed specifically for “highly dynamic cloud-native environment[s],” making it easy for them to adapt it to “the needs of cloud-native applications.”

Lodge also shared his thoughts on the importance of open-source in the modern tech context. “There’s no way we could have done what we have done with this and made the scale-out service without it being open-source,” he stated. “We were able to take something that existed and build on it, and essentially build a new iteration of that.”

And beyond the advantages open-source offers to developers, there’s a marketing edge to it as well. “I think open-source is now what customers expect … even though they might want to buy a commercial product or buy a commercial version, that’s the foundation. That is what they want to have, they don’t want to be locked in,” Lodge said, pointing out how the dependencies of “the previous generation of technology” have made businesses wary of those sorts of commitments, and how this means that “another reason for them to go after cloud-native is to give themselves more options.”

*Disclosure: The Linux Foundation and other companies sponsor some KubeCon 2016 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither The Linux Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE