The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is “hoovering up” heavy-weight industry sponsors who leverage its popular open-source projects. Enterprise adoption of cloud-native architectures isn’t vrooming along at quite the same pace thanks to complexities, though interest is palpable. Can big tech dollars and a little end-user feedback finally manifest the simplified Kubernetes both camps crave for container orchestration management tech?

We’re standing on the cloud-native tipping point, according to Dan Kohn (pictured), executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We describe this moment for the organization and the community as the end of the beginning,” he said. “2018 very well could be the moment that we jump over to the early majority.”

The CNCF more than tripled its project count from four to 14 in the past year. It now has the potential to catapult cloud-native computing further into mainstream enterprise adoption. “But as that happens, there’s just far, far more people who need to be educated in the space,” Kohn said.

Kohn recently explained how CNCF plans to do just that and penetrate enterprises during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas. He spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Dan Kohn in our Guest of the Week feature.

More containers, more management problems

Containers — a virtualized method for running distributed applications — act as wrappers for many cloud-native applications built with microservices. Twenty-five percent of companies now use containers, according to a recent report from Cloud Foundry.

The trickiness of managing containers at scale spawned several container orchestration tools. CNCF’s Kubernetes is a platform for managing and orchestrating containers; it “anchors” the entire foundation, Khon explained. In one survey, 43 percent of respondents said they used Kubernetes to manage containers. This makes it the most popular such tool, beating out Docker Inc.’s Swarm and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Elastic Container Service.

However, some still complain that Kubernetes is a jumble of complexities. In response, the CNCF is aggressively working to simplify Kubernetes and other projects through teamwork, handy new services and implementation assists.

“Right now the focus is really about providing better services to our projects. All of them feel overworked,” Kohn said. “That’s really what we’re bucking down on.” Documentation and test development are two areas in need of nourishment, he added.

Big cloud armistice at CNCF

Luckily, the flushest companies in the industry are pouring their bucks and brains into CNCF and Kubernetes. The top three public cloud providers — AWS, Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. — have all signed on. Other members include IBM Corp., Intel Corp., VMware Inc., Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Inc.

What do the hefty $350,000 annual price tags both AWS and Microsoft reportedly pay for their board seats buy them? For one, it allows them some influence in the channeling of funds across CNCF projects. (Kohn is quick to point out there are no tyrants in the CNCF, and projects ultimately manage themselves). In a sense, membership with a measure of influence pays for itself since these cloud providers increasingly use Kubernetes to power their own services.

“They are absolutely fierce competitors,” Kohn said. “This specific software infrastructure layer isn’t the area that they want to compete; they want to compete on all the value-added services.”

This also explains why competitors Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. both donated key in-house software to CNCF on the same day last September. Lyft freed up Envoy — an edge and service proxy providing network transparency to applications. Uber donated Jaeger — a distributed tracing system for microservice-based architectures.

“The underlying concept is that companies agree that sharing key parts of their infrastructure adds a huge amount of value to the whole ecosystem, to each other — and then they’re absolutely eager to compete above that,” Kohn said. 

User feedback ups Kubernetes’ enterprise game

Competing above Kubernetes’ software infrastructure may entail building services that solve common end-user headaches. Griping from current containers and Kubernetes users can be put to good use in crafting these solutions. In the Cloud Foundry report, 82 percent surveyed said, “Containers can be a challenge to get to scale”; and 80 percent said, “Except in simple use cases containers are complicated.”

Whittling away at this complexity is the top priority at CNCF and Kubernetes. And it appears to be the trend across the container world, generally, according to Alex Robinson, software engineer at Cockroach Labs, as quoted by The Enterprise Project.

“The gold rush phase of early innovation has slowed down and given way to a much stronger focus on stability and usability,” Robinson said. “This means we’ll see fewer major announcements of new orchestration systems and more security options, management tools and features that make it easier to take advantage of the flexibility already inherent in the major orchestration systems.”

Persistent storage is the biggest hurtle to running containers, according to a Portworx Inc. survey. CNCF’s storage working group is scrabbling hard to nix this issue, Kohn explained. Pluggable architectures were lauded at this year’s KubeCon. They allow diverse users to hook into Kubernetes’ various software pieces. Another favorite, Istio service mesh enables microservices in containers to communicate more fluidly. Heptio, launched by two Kubernetes project creators, simplifies implementation for businesses with technology solutions and on-premises or virtual training.

Serverless computing is another cloud-native baby just learning to stand and waddle around. The serverless community has a motley array of approaches clamoring about. That many serverlesss functions offerings have Kubernetes baked in will doubtless spark interesting compare-and-contrast conversations going forward.

“I think there’s still huge swathes of this space that are still up in the air,” Kohn said. He hopes that as Kubernetes picks up end users, they will join the CNCF and contribute to perfecting the platform.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE