A second initiative that also has widespread industry acceptance is the CNCF. While still focused on containerized workloads, the CNCF operates a bit higher up the stack, at the application design level.

Its purpose is to provide a standard set of tools and technologies to build, operate, and orchestrate cloud-native application stacks. Cloud has given us access to a variety of new technologies and practices that can improve and evolve our classic software designs. The CNCF is also particularly focused on the new paradigm of microservice-oriented development.

As a founding participant in the CNCF, Google has donated the Kubernetes open source project. The goal will be to increase interoperability in the ecosystem and support better integration with projects. The CNCF already hosts a variety of projects on orchestration, logging, monitoring, tracing, and application resilience.

We'll talk more about the CNCF, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and the landscape therein in the following chapters.