While the relatively new maxim “Every company should be a software company” and variants thereof are repeated many times a day, few organizations really understand exactly what this will mean for them. The ability to deploy software dozens of times per day — having a continuous integration and a continuous deployment pipeline — this is what many consider to be an absolute table ante for being a modern company, according to Dan Kohn (pictured), executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

“Not just a software company, but arguably every company today needs to be doing software development like that,” Kohn said. He added that the CNCF provides a whole set of infrastructure that allows enterprises to not just have that kind of dynamic software environment in development, but also the ability to push it into production.

Kohn recently joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the isco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, California.

In addition to discussing the necessity of software development, they also discussed what the CNCF helps organizations accomplish and an in-depth history of Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Avoiding vendor lock-in

CNCF helps enterprises build a stack of software that allows them to run applications on bare metal; in their own data center; on any of the public clouds; or within a hybrid solution, mixing back and forth between clouds, Kohn explained.

The key idea is that all of the core components are open source, supported by multiple different vendors, helping enterprises avoid vendor lock-in. He added that while Amazon Web Services Inc. has some of the most extraordinary engineering and great services that make it very easy for enterprises to on board. There are downsides, however, he stated.

“But if you build your whole architecture around that, then you’re stuck with AWS forever,” Kohn said. Many organizations would prefer more freedom of choice, he added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE