There are a lot of things in life that most people could do without and not feel the irritation of inconvenience. Plumbing is not one of them, and in many ways the work of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation might fall into a similar category.

“I sometimes describe it as the plumbing software for the internet,” said Dan Kohn (pictured, right), executive director of the CNCF, who related how he often characterizes his job in social settings. “Plumbing is really important. If it breaks, we all get extremely upset.”

Kohn spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney) at the KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU event in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was joined by Dee Kumar (pictured, left), vice president of marketing at The Linux Foundation, and they discussed expanding participation by developers, an updated tool to track the cloud-native journey, and momentum envisioned for the year ahead. (* Disclosure below.)

Adding 20,000 developers in three years

CNCF will celebrate its third birthday in July and now has 20,000 developers engaged in its 20 active projects, according to Kohn. It has become a major influence in enabling the era of multicloud applications, a key ingredient in the plumbing of the internet.

The Foundation’s expanding ecosystem has led it to help enterprises and developers chart a course through the evolving world of cloud-native technologies by issuing Interactive Landscape 2.0 in March. “It’s our attempt to define the cloud-native journey,” Kumar said.

The Linux Foundation and CNCF are encouraging developers to share their use cases as a way to continue the innovation momentum. Security heads the use-case list because of the group’s enterprise audience, according to Kumar.

“Second, it’s about agility, who gets to the market first,” Kumar said. “Then there’s scalability. People are really thinking about how to adopt Kubernetes on a large scale.”

Cloud native’s flexibility is helping propel user adoption, a trend that Kohn sees as a harbinger of good things to come. “Today, you can pick this software platform and then deploy it to any public, private or hybrid cloud and avoid that lock-in, but get all of these advantages in terms of high velocity,” he said. “I think we can make the argument that 2018 is the year that Kubernetes crosses the chasm outside of just innovators and into the early majority.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2018 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2018. Neither Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE