On day one of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon (Copenhagen), Dan Kohn, the executive director of CNCF, provided attendees with an overview of the growth of the organization and the communities around open source projects that it hosts.

According to Kohn, this is the biggest KubeCon/CloudNativeCon ever. There were more than 4,300 attendees at the conference. There is a space since 2016 conference.

CNCF started off with the donation of Kubernetes as an anchor project. Today there are dozens of projects under the CNCF umbrella. More than 22,000 people are actively contributing to various CNCF projects.

Despite being a relatively newer project, Kubernetes has become a favorite in the enterprise space. Today there are more than 216 members of CNCF, which grew from 81 last year. Quite an impressive growth.

At the Copenhagen conference, Kohn announced three new members including JD.com as a platinum member, which is the highest tier of membership at CNCF.

In terms of code, Kohn said that compared to the Linux kernel, Kubernetes has over 35 million lined of code. I have seen this pattern of OpenStack and Kubernetes communities often saying that they have grown bigger than the Linux kernel, which is fair. But we must remember that it’s Linux that paved the path for these projects. Linux made enterprise player comfortable with the idea of open sourcing their code and sharing it with their competitors. Linux, as part of the LAMP stack, also build the very infrastructure on which these cloud native technologies run. So, as great as it is to see communities like Kubernetes growing faster than Linux; we need to remind over selves that we are standing on the shoulders of the giant called Linux.

Kohn also announced a new program called ‘Kubernetes Certified Developer Program. Kohn concluded his talk by talking about the importance of CI (testing) and compared it with hardcore science.

…to be continued.