CNCF Launches Kubernetes Certification Program

Kubernetes, an open source container management technology, is being adopted among developers at an unprecedented pace.

This vendor-agnostic tool radically simplifies the task of building, deploying and maintaining distributed systems and has become popular among big and small technology companies alike because it significantly lowers the cost of cloud computing expenses.

Since it was unveiled and first became available in 2014, it quickly started playing a key role in multi-cloud and open platform strategies and has become a core component for cloud related services offered by top technology – among them IBM, Google, Huwei, Samsung, VMware and Oracle, to name a few.

Now the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a member of the Linux Foundation, has taken a big step to ensure that Kubernetes distribution meets a set of standards by releasing the Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program.
Cloud Services Providers Raw HTML ModuleCloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, originally founded by Google, Twitter, Huwai, Intel, Docker and Cisco, hosts critical components of cloud native software stacks including Kubernetes, Fluentd, linkerd, Prometheus and OpenTracing.

As part of the new certification program, product providers first run a test suite to demonstrate that their product conforms to the test. Then once completed, CNCF issues certification of the test. Once CNCF has certified the implementation, the product provider can use the new Certified Kubernetes logo and can use the Kubernetes name in combination with its product name as well.

Dan Kohn, CNCF’s executive director, notes that "the interoperability that this program ensures is essential to Kubernetes meeting its promise of offering a single open source software stack supported by many vendors that can deploy on any public, private or hybrid cloud."

Any product provider can run the conformance test suite and subsequently submit the test results to CNCF.

The Certified Kubernetes Conformance program offers enterprises peace of mind that Certified Kubernetes products provide true consistency and workload portability. The certification provides a guarantee that the Kubernetes API functions on that platform conform to the standard.

Not only does the certification ensure flexibility on deployment of containers but going forward it will also make it easier to move workloads among different platforms.

More than 30 products already have passed the certification process, including IBM Cloud Container Service and IBM Cloud Private, Docker Enterprise Edition, Cisco Container Platform, VMware’s Pivotal Container Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Microsoft Azure ACS-Engine and Oracle Terraform Kubernetes Installer.

“From the day Google first open-sourced Kubernetes, the goal has been to provide a highly portable cloud native platform for developers to quickly deploy services on premises, in public cloud, and in hybrid environments,” says Eyal Manor, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud. “The Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program is a way for vendors to prove that they are offering pure Kubernetes, with continuous, seamless upgrades, giving users assurance that they can continue to benefit from the innovation and portability Kubernetes offers.”