It was announced alongside Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the Linux Foundation by Google as a seed technology.

Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, RX-M, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware.

In order to establish qualified representatives of the technologies governed by the CNCF, a program was announced at the inaugural CloudNativeDay in Toronto in August, 2016.

[5][6] The foundation announced Priyanka Sharma, director of Cloud Native Alliances at GitLab, would step into a general manager role in his place.

In January 2020, the CNCF annual report for the previous year was issued and reflected significant growth to the foundation across membership, event attendance, training, and industry investment.

[11] The defined criteria include rate of adoption, longevity and whether the open source project can be relied upon to build a production-grade product.

[15] In July 2020, Priyanka Sharma stated that CNCF is looking to increase the number of open source projects in the cloud native ecosystem.

[22] Originally built at Lyft to move their architecture away from a monolith, Envoy is a high-performance open source edge and service proxy that makes the network transparent to applications.

[29] Harbor is an "open source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, signs, and scans content.

[34][35] Created by Uber Engineering, Jaeger is an open source distributed tracing system inspired by Google Dapper paper and OpenZipkin community.

[40] The "large and diverse" community supporting the project has made its staying power more robust than other, older technologies of the same ilk.

[41] In January 2020, the CNCF annual report showed significant growth in interest, training, event attendance and investment related to Kubernetes.

The plugin interfaces it exposes allows users to write integrations with in-house systems, build internal self-service portals, and more.

TUF addresses this widespread problem by providing a comprehensive, flexible security framework that developers can integrate with any software update system.

[58] Cortex offers horizontally scalable, multi-tenant, long-term storage for Prometheus and works alongside Amazon DynamoDB, Google Bigtable, Cassandra, S3, GCS, and Microsoft Azure.

[63] KeyCloak is an open-source software product to allow single sign-on with identity and access management aimed at modern applications and services.

[65] In September 2020, CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) announced that KubeEdge was accepted as an incubating project.

[66] In June 2020, API management platform Kong announced that it would donate its open-source service mesh control plane technology, called Kuma, to CNCF as a sandbox project.

[67] In July 2020, MayaData donated Litmus, an open source chaos engineering tool that runs natively on Kubernetes, to CNCF as a sandbox-level project.

[68] NATS consists of a collection of open source messaging technologies that "implements the publish/subscribe, request/reply and distributed queue patterns to help create a performant and secure method of InterProcess Communication (IPC).

[59] CNCF hosts a number of efforts and initiatives to serve the cloud native community, including: CNCF hosts the co-located KubeCon and CloudNativeCon conferences, which have become a keystone events for technical users and business professionals seeking to increase Kubernetes and cloud-native knowledge.

Sharma also stated that she was "personally involved in a project to eradicate racially problematic terminology from code" and that the foundation is "actively working to improve the gender and racial balance inside the cloud native ecosystem" while remaining committed to creating spaces and opportunities for LGBTQIA+, women, Black and Brown people, and differently-abled people, specifically in regards to KubeCon.

[100] One path toward becoming a Kubernetes-certified IT professional is the vendor-agnostic Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) accreditation, which is relevant to admins who work across a range of cloud platforms.

[105] The self-paced course covers the system architecture, the problems Kubernetes solves, and the model it uses to handle containerized deployments and scaling.

[105] CNCF developed a landscape map that shows the full extent of cloud native solutions, many of which fall under their umbrella.

This interactive catalog was created in response to the proliferation of third-party technologies and the resulting decision-fatigue engineers and developers often experience when selecting software tools.