Google, Docker, Box, IBM and others form container-focused industry group

Some of the biggest IT players have come together to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that plans to create and drive the adoption of a new set of common container technologies.Organised by the Linux Foundation, the new group has drawn the support of AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Red Hat, Twitter, VMWare, among others.[caption id="attachment_1847255" align="alignleft" width="380" class=" "] Image: Reuters[/caption]This new organisation aims to advance the state-of-the-art for building cloud native applications and services, allowing developers to take full advantage of existing and to-be-developed open source technologies. Cloud native refers to applications or services that are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and micro services-oriented.

The Foundation will look at open source at the orchestration level, followed by the integration of hosts and services by defining API's and standards through a code-first approach to advance the state-of-art of container-packaged application infrastructure. The organization will also work with the recently announced Open Container Initiative on its container image specification. Beyond orchestration and the image specification, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to assemble components to address a comprehensive set of container application infrastructure needs.

Google said it is contributing the Kubernetes open source container orchestration system it developed to the new foundation.

"We believe that this foundation will help harmonise the broader ecosystem, and are pleased to contribute Kubernetes, the open source cluster scheduler, to the foundation as a seed technology," Craig McLuckie, Product Manager, Google, said.

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As a first step, we plan to seed the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Kubernetes, Google said in a blog post. "CNCF [The Foundation] will govern the future open source development of Kubernetes and ensure it continues to work well on any infrastructure: public cloud, private cloud, or bare metal."

"CNCF will be guided by a technical committee who will engage open source and partner communities to build new software to make the entire container toolset more robust. They will also evaluate additional projects for inclusion in the foundation and ensure that the overall toolset works well as a whole."