Originally reported by ZDNet, August 2017.
AWS Joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
In a move that signaled near-universal industry adoption, Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member in August 2017. At the time, Kubernetes had already established itself as the dominant open-source container orchestration platform, with official support from every major cloud provider — except AWS. That gap closed with this announcement.
With AWS on board, all five of the largest cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and Alibaba Cloud — became CNCF members. The move effectively ratified Kubernetes as the industry standard for cloud-native container management.
Why AWS Joining Was Inevitable
AWS’s membership was widely anticipated. According to a survey cited at the time of the announcement, 63 percent of Kubernetes users were already hosting their clusters on Amazon EC2 — up from 44 percent the previous year. In other words, a large portion of the Kubernetes ecosystem was already running on AWS infrastructure, even without official AWS backing for the project.
Several prominent companies were running Kubernetes in production on AWS, including CNCF End User Community participants NCSOFT, Ticketmaster, Vevo, and Zalando. The community momentum made formal AWS involvement a logical next step.
What AWS Committed To
Adrian Cockcroft, then AWS VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy and a new member of the CNCF board, outlined AWS’s intentions clearly:
“Many CNCF projects already run in the AWS Cloud. We are excited to join the Foundation to ensure that customers continue to have a great experience running these workloads on AWS.”
Adrian Cockcroft, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy, AWS
Cockcroft identified several specific areas of focus for AWS within the CNCF ecosystem:
- Containerd: AWS was a founding member of the Containerd project, which provides the standard container runtime. AWS expressed plans to deepen its involvement and improve the customer experience around it.
- Container Network Interface (CNI): AWS’s forthcoming ECS Task Networking capabilities were being written as a CNI plugin. Cockcroft stated that CNI was expected to become the basis for all container-based networking on AWS.
- Kubernetes tooling: AWS Principal Open Source Technologist Arun Gupta began publishing hands-on blog posts about Kubernetes installers on AWS, starting with
kops. AWS also announced plans for further Kubernetes blog posts and code contributions. - CNCF incubation: AWS signaled interest in proposing existing and future AWS open-source projects for incubation under the CNCF umbrella.
Industry Reaction: The Cloud-Native Era Begins
Dan Kohn, CNCF Executive Director at the time, welcomed the announcement:
“As the largest cloud provider, AWS brings years of experience in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing and enormous expertise in cloud native technologies.”
Dan Kohn, Executive Director, CNCF
Kohn also framed the moment in broader historical terms, describing the shift away from the virtualization era toward a cloud-native paradigm built on open-source software stacks capable of enabling workload portability across public, private, and hybrid clouds. With all major cloud vendors collaborating under the CNCF, Kubernetes became the focal point of that cross-industry effort.
The CNCF’s Broader Role
Beyond Kubernetes, the CNCF serves as a vendor-neutral home for a range of open-source container and cloud-native projects. At the time of AWS’s membership, notable projects under its governance included:
- Containerd — the standard container runtime
- Container Network Interface (CNI) — a specification and libraries for configuring network interfaces in Linux containers
- Linkerd — a transparent proxy for container service discovery, routing, and failure handling (an early service mesh implementation)
AWS’s platinum membership gave it a seat on the CNCF governing board, providing direct influence over the direction of these projects and the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
Significance for DevOps Teams
For DevOps practitioners, AWS joining the CNCF as a platinum member in 2017 was a watershed moment. It removed any remaining ambiguity about whether Kubernetes was a viable long-term choice for teams running workloads on AWS. With all major cloud providers aligned behind the same orchestration platform and contributing to the same open-source ecosystem, teams could invest in Kubernetes skills and tooling with confidence — regardless of their cloud provider.
This also marked the beginning of a period of rapid Kubernetes maturation on AWS, eventually leading to the launch of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in 2018, which provided a fully managed Kubernetes control plane for AWS customers.