The COVID-19 pandemic drove major organizations to adopt cloud native computing and solutions. Now, enterprises are finding ways to give back to the cloud community — by supporting and actively participating in the development of open-source projects.

“We see banks and financial organizations that are looking to adopt open source, but more importantly, they’re looking for ways to either contribute or actually deep-dive a bit more into these areas,” said Katie Gamanji (pictured, right), ecosystem advocate for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The past few months have brought in big names, including Peloton, Airbnb, City Bank, according to Cheryl Hung (pictured, left), vice president of ecosystem at CNCF. “Just some incredible organizations who have really adopted cloud native … and now are looking to give back to the community,” she said

Gamanji and Hung spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. They discussed enterprise adoption of cloud native, enterprise cloud infrastructure and inclusion in the cloud community. (* Disclosure below.)

Creating a more accessible cloud native community

As the cloud ecosystem matures, how people talk about cloud adoption has also started to change. More often, technical discussions are being complemented by user stories and community discussions about how people and organizations have solved tough problems.

“At the beginning of KubeCon, there is a lot of focus on the technical aspects. How can you fix this particular problem of deploying between two clusters at scale. [It’s] a lot of technical aspects nowadays. [Now,] they’re looking for the stories,” Gamanji said. “What keeps [end users] on this path and what future challenges they would like to tackle or they’re facing at the moment and would like to solve in the future.”

At the same time, cloud organizations are working to make these discussions more accessible.

“[We launched] community-organized events in Africa, for example for people who couldn’t come to large events in North America or Europe,” Hung explained. “We’re also launching things to help students. I actually love talking to students because, quite often, now you talk to them and they say, ‘Oh, I’ve never run software in anything other than a container.’”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. (*Disclosure: Red Hat sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE