Salesforce is latest big tech vendor to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Salesforce announced today that it was joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source organization that manages Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration tool.

It is the latest in a long line of big name companies, joining the likes of AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and Pivotal, all of whom joined in a flurry of activity earlier this year. Most of these other companies have more of a cloud infrastructure angle. Salesforce is a SaaS vendor, but it too is seeing what so many others are seeing: containerization provides a way to more tightly control the development process. Kubernetes and cloud native computing in general are a big part of that, and Salesforce wants a piece of the action.

Salesforce’s Mark Interrante wrote in a blog post on Medium announcing the partnership that it’s always a good sign when developers adopt new technologies like Kubernetes quickly. It proves that they see how these tools help create products faster and easier, certainly a goal for a company like Salesforce that is generating new products at a rapid pace.

In fact, Interrante wrote that Salesforce’s development teams have adopted many of the CNCF tools, including Kubernetes. “We’ve seen how containerization simplifies the orchestration of software across a large fleet of servers. Kubernetes makes a great foundation for continuous innovation/continuous delivery which then improves our software delivery,” Interrante wrote.

Salesforce, much like the other large software companies that have joined the CNCF, wants to benefit from being a part of the process and helping to influence the development of key tools moving forward. “This kind of collaboration, with Salesforce as an active participant in open technology ecosystems, is key to helping us move forward,” he wrote.

The CNCF and Kubernetes have become a force in the containerization space in a relatively short time. While Docker is another popular container technology that helps developers create containerized software, Kubernetes helps deploy and manage it all and Salesforce wants a closer relationship with the organization that’s running the project.