Alibaba Cloud and Baidu become CNCF members
Austin, Texas — The two major cloud companies, Alibaba Cloud and Baidu, have announced their support of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) by becoming members of the organization, as noted this week at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017.
The Linux Foundation Collaborative project originally founded CNCF in July 2015, with the backing of tech heavyweights like Cisco, Docker, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and VMware, to name just a few. Microsoft along with cloud competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently joined as members too, meaning all major cloud players now support CNCF and Kubernetes. Since it was founded, the foundation has extended support beyond Kubernetes, currently hosting 14 different open-source cloud native projects that provide developers with tools to create businesses based on cloud technologies.
Alibaba Cloud was established in September 2009 in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of parent company Alibaba Group, and currently the number one cloud provider in China. The company has become a platinum member of CNCF, making it one of nine platinum members to join the foundation or upgrade this year, including AWS, Dell Technologies, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Oracle, Pivotal, SAP and VMware. Under the membership, Hong Tang, chief architect of Alibaba Cloud, will join CNCF’s Governing Board.
“Alibaba Cloud is the biggest provider of cloud computing services in mainland China and third largest infrastructure as a service cloud computing provider worldwide. As enterprises throughout the world look to modernize application environments, we are here to lend our expertise,” said Tang. “As part of the CNCF community, Alibaba Cloud is adopting technologies developed through CNCF projects, contributing code to the projects and collaborating with fellow members.”
Baidu is a major China web services company and a global leader of artificial intelligence. The company joined CNCF as a gold member. Baudi announced earlier this year the compatibility of its deep learning framework PaddlePaddle with Kubernetes, making it the first machine learning tool to support the open source container management platform. The company said it and other community members continue to update and polish PaddlePaddle for Kubernetes.
“Baidu has extensive experience in participating in open source communities,” said Watson Yin, vice president of Baidu. “We decided to open source PaddePaddle over a year ago, and, this July, we announced our overarching commitment to an open platform and win-win AI ecosystem with our partners and developers. Baidu believes cloud native technologies are critical to accelerating machine learning. CNCF membership is a way for us to directly invest in many of the most cutting-edge, promising cloud native technologies to fuel richer, faster deep learning market growth.”
