As the Cloud Native Computing Foundation marks its fifth year of operation, the group’s growing range of projects highlights an important milestone for open-source computing. With continued expansion of the cloud native community and more companies, including many of the world’s largest enterprises, becoming involved, open source is beginning to define its own value.

“It signals a maturity in the market where organizations are investing in open source because they know they’re going to get something out of it,” said Joep Piscaer (pictured, right), independent content creator and analyst at TLA Tech. “Back in the day, it was not necessarily certain that if you put a lot of effort into an open-source project for your own gain or purposes, that would work out. Now, with the backing of the CNCF, as well as so many member and user organizations, participating in open source becomes easier because there’s more of a guarantee that what you put in will circulate and come to have value for you in a different way.”

Piscaer spoke with Stu Miniman (pictured, left), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the keynote analysis as part of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 event. They discussed remarks delivered by CNCF’s new general manager, growing interest in service mesh technology and the continued evolution of Kubernetes. (* Disclosure below.)

A foundation of doers

In June, CNCF named Priyanka Sharma the organization’s new general manager. In her KubeCon keynote remarks, Sharma addressed the group’s key role in driving end-user solutions.

“She said, ‘It’s a foundation of doers powering end-user driven open-source,’” Miniman noted. “It went from open source being something that people did on the weekend on the side to many end users and lots of vendors with full-time people whose jobs are to contribute and participate in the open-source communities.”

One example of how larger companies are making key investments in open source can be found in the service mesh arena. The development of technology to create an abstraction layer across networks to more easily deploy microservices-based applications has resulted in service mesh products, such as Google LLC’s Istio and a newly announced Open Service Mesh from Microsoft Corp.

Although Microsoft indicated that it would hand over control of its service mesh project to CNCF, Google recently reversed course on Istio, saying it would transfer trademarks to another organization.

“Service meshes are still a hot topic; it’s one of the spaces where most discussion is geared toward,” Piscaer said. “Service meshes, from a complexity perspective, are not mature enough to be commoditized into a standard. We’ll need a little while to let this market shift and innovate, because I don’t think we’ve reached the end state with service meshes.”

While there is no shortage of projects for CNCF, and many of them will receive plenty of discussion during this week’s event, much of the conversation will still revolve around Kubernetes. The popular container orchestration platform continues to attract widespread enterprise interest, and there is plenty of activity in the space.

On Monday, Red Hat Inc. announced updates for its developer tools with new capabilities for Kubernetes.

“Every platform basically has at least one Kubernetes option built into it,” Miniman said. “VMware baked Kubernetes into vSphere 7; Red Hat with OpenShift has thousands of customers and great momentum. There is no shortage of options.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual Experience. Neither show sponsor CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE