A Decade of Cloud Native: The CNCF’s 10-Year Journey

In the ten years since its inception, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has evolved from a fledgling open source initiative into a cornerstone of modern software development. Founded in 2015 as a Linux Foundation project to advance cloud-native computing, CNCF started with a single project (Kubernetes) and a handful of founding members. Today, it hosts hundreds of projects driven by over 220,000 contributors across 190 countries. This journey has been marked by rapid community growth, major technological milestones, and a transformative impact on the cloud-native and open-source ecosystems. In this blog post, we’ll chronicle CNCF’s evolution over the past decade, highlighting key projects, community metrics, and the foundation’s influence, in a friendly, narrative style suitable for any tech enthusiast.

Origins: Inception of CNCF (2015)¶

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation was born in 2015 out of a vision to make scalable, container-based cloud computing accessible to everyone. At OSCON 2015, Google’s Craig McLuckie outlined a plan for an open, standardized infrastructure that could work across any cloud provider. To realize this, Google donated its groundbreaking container orchestration system, Kubernetes, to form the seed technology of a new foundation under the Linux Foundation. In December 2015, CNCF was officially formed with Kubernetes 1.0 as the inaugural project and with founding members including Google, Red Hat, CoreOS, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Docker, VMware, and others. This diverse backing signaled broad industry support from day one.

Kubernetes’ contribution to CNCF embodied the foundation’s purpose: to cultivate a sustainable, vendor-neutral home for vital open source cloud technologies. As CNCF’s first hosted project, Kubernetes demonstrated the value of a neutral governance model that could attract thousands of contributors and adopters. This model was set to be repeated with many projects in the coming years.

Laying the Foundation (2016 - 2017)¶

In its early years, CNCF moved quickly to expand beyond Kubernetes. By mid-2016, the foundation’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) had accepted Prometheus, an open source monitoring and alerting toolkit, as its second hosted project. Prometheus, contributed by SoundCloud engineers, complemented Kubernetes by enabling metrics-based monitoring of cloud-native apps. Soon after, CNCF welcomed OpenTracing (a vendor-neutral API for distributed tracing) as the third project in 2016, addressing the growing need to trace microservices performance. This was followed by Fluentd (log collection), which joined as the sixth hosted project in late 2016. Early 2017 saw Linkerd (service mesh) accepted as CNCF’s fifth project, alongside the likes of Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, and Fluentd.

As the project roster grew, CNCF formalized its governance. In 2017 the TOC introduced a graduated maturity model (sandbox/incubating/graduated) to guide projects through stages of adoption. Projects like Linkerd were classified as “Inception” (now Sandbox) with mentorship to help them progress. This period also saw major industry players deepen their involvement. Notably, Docker donated its core container runtime containerd to CNCF in early 2017, with support from the largest cloud providers. Containerd’s inclusion, alongside Kubernetes and others, underscored CNCF’s role in integrating key parts of the cloud-native stack under one roof.

Community momentum accelerated rapidly. CNCF’s membership swelled to include startups and enterprise giants alike, crossing over 100 member companies within two years. All major cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, Alibaba, etc.) became members by 2017, reflecting a consensus around cloud-native technologies. The foundation also launched programs to support the ecosystem: for example, the Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) program and Kubernetes training/certification were introduced in mid-2017, establishing a professional skills pipeline around CNCF projects.

On the community events front, KubeCon, the Kubernetes and cloud-native conference, exploded in popularity. The first KubeCon in 2015 had roughly 500 attendees in San Francisco. A year later in November 2016, KubeCon North America had grown to over 1,000 attendees in Seattle. By late 2017, the event (co-branded KubeCon + CloudNativeCon) drew 4,100+ participants in Austin, a fourfold increase over the previous year. This surge foreshadowed the even larger expansions to come.

Explosion of Projects and Adoption (2018 - 2019)¶

By 2018, “cloud-native” had evolved from a buzzword into a mainstream IT movement, and CNCF was at the heart of it. That year marked several watershed milestones for the foundation. In March 2018, Kubernetes became the first CNCF project to graduate, signaling its robust adoption and governance maturity. It was soon followed by Prometheus, which graduated in August 2018 as CNCF’s second graduated project. Later that year, Envoy, a high-performance service proxy contributed by Lyft, also reached graduated status. These projects had demonstrated thriving communities, stability, and broad use in production, meeting the TOC’s strict criteria for graduation.

2018 also saw an onrush of new projects entering CNCF’s fold. The foundation accepted technologies spanning the cloud-native spectrum: etcd (distributed key-value store behind Kubernetes) joined as an incubating project in 2018; CoreDNS (a DNS server for service discovery) was adopted and later graduated in 2019; Harbor (container registry), Helm (Kubernetes package manager), and Jaeger (distributed tracing system) all became CNCF projects and would soon progress toward graduation. By the end of 2018, CNCF was hosting dozens of projects across diverse categories like container runtimes, messaging, storage, networking, and security. In fact, 10 new projects were added in 2017 alone (including Envoy, containerd, CoreDNS, rkt, Notary, and others), a clear indicator of the ecosystem’s rapid expansion.

The community growth during this period was nothing short of astonishing. CNCF’s flagship conference attendance jumped exponentially year-over-year. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 in Seattle drew 8,000+ attendees, a 90% increase from the previous year. (The demand was so high that the event sold out with a waitlist of over 1,000 people). The first-ever KubeCon China was held in Shanghai in November 2018, attracting 2,500 attendees and selling out as well, a record for a debut international event. By 2019, the North American KubeCon in San Diego hosted nearly 12,000 attendees, up 49% from 2018, with participants from 67 countries. CNCF’s community was clearly no longer niche, it had become a global phenomenon spanning developers, IT operators, and end users from organizations of all sizes.

Amidst this growth, CNCF made important infrastructure investments to sustain its projects. In 2017, the foundation set up the CNCF Community Infrastructure Lab in partnership with Packet (now Equinix Metal), providing free on-demand access to bare-metal servers for project testing and CI across multiple architectures. This enabled the cross-cloud continuous integration initiative: CNCF began continuously testing its projects on major public clouds and bare metal to ensure interoperability. The foundation also launched a conformance program for Kubernetes, allowing vendors to certify their Kubernetes offerings for compatibility. These initiatives built trust in the ecosystem by ensuring that “cloud-native” meant reliable, cross‑platform consistency.

By the end of 2019, CNCF had firmly established itself as the hub of the cloud-native universe. It had nurtured a roster of successful projects (Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, etcd, containerd, CoreDNS, Fluentd, Jaeger, and more) that were powering production systems at scale. Maintainer and contributor communities were thriving: Fluentd, for example, had over 160 contributors and 5,000+ data users by the time it graduated in 2019. The foundation’s membership had grown into the hundreds, including all the top cloud providers and enterprise IT firms. With such momentum, cloud-native computing was transitioning from early adopter status to a default paradigm for modern app development.

Cloud Native Goes Mainstream (2020 - 2021)¶

The early 2020s solidified CNCF’s transition from a fast-growing startup foundation into a mature, mainstream force. In 2020, despite the challenges of a global pandemic, the demand for cloud-native technologies surged (as organizations embraced cloud software and distributed systems more than ever). CNCF pivoted its events and programs to virtual formats while continuing to support its expanding community. Even without in-person conferences, interest did not wane, thousands tuned into virtual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in 2020, and the foundation’s online presence grew via webinars, maintainer sessions, and forums.

During this period, many projects that had joined CNCF in prior years reached graduation or other major milestones. In 2020 alone, Harbor (container registry) and Helm (K8s package manager) graduated to full maturity, as did Jaeger (tracing) and Rook (storage). The project landscape also continued to diversify. CNCF accepted and incubated new projects in areas like cloud-native security (e.g. SPIFFE/SPIRE for identity, Falco for runtime security), service mesh (Linkerd became the first service mesh to graduate in 2021, while Istio, long overseen by Google/IBM, finally joined CNCF in 2022), and GitOps (Flux and Argo CD for continuous delivery). Notably, CNCF embraced the emerging WebAssembly and Serverless movements by hosting projects like Envoy’s WebAssembly SDK and CloudEvents. This showed the foundation’s agility in tackling new frontiers of cloud-native beyond containers alone.

Community metrics reflected CNCF’s mainstream status by 2021. The number of contributors involved in CNCF projects shot past 120,000 and continued climbing rapidly. The end-user community (organizations using cloud-native tech but not selling services) also swelled, over 140 end-user member companies were providing real-world feedback and use cases to CNCF by 2021. Membership in CNCF reached into the upper hundreds, including a broad mix of tech vendors, enterprises, and startups. Despite consolidation in the tech industry, CNCF was able to both attract new investment and retain key long-term members, indicating the industry’s sustained commitment to cloud-native computing.

By mid-decade, CNCF’s annual reports highlighted staggering numbers: the 2022 report noted CNCF was then host to 157 projects, supported by 853 member organizations, and an astounding 178,000 contributors worldwide. The foundation’s Training and Certification programs had also grown, producing tens of thousands of Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA) and Kubernetes Application Developers (CKAD), further feeding the ecosystem with skilled practitioners.

A Thriving Ecosystem (2022 - 2025)¶

As CNCF reached the decade mark, it entered 2025 at the helm of an ecosystem that had changed the face of enterprise technology. The project tally surpassed 170 by 2023, with new innovative projects continuously joining. For instance, CNCF accepted Istio (the popular service mesh co-developed by Google and IBM) in 2022; by mid-2023, Istio had already graduated, highlighting CNCF’s ability to quickly onboard and elevate significant projects. Other notable additions and graduations in the 2022 - 2024 timeframe included Argo (a suite of GitOps and workflow tools, graduated 2022), Flux (GitOps toolkit, graduated 2022), Cilium (eBPF-based networking, graduated 2023), and Falco (security monitoring, graduated 2024). By 2025, CNCF boasted over 30 graduated projects (up from just Kubernetes in 2018), a testament to the foundation’s success in helping projects mature.

The community continued to flourish through large-scale events and grassroots engagement. After returning to in-person format, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conferences broke records: KubeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam and KubeCon North America 2023 each drew on the order of 8,000 - 10,000+ attendees (with thousands more participating online). In fact, KubeCon Europe 2025 (held in London), marking CNCF’s 10th anniversary, was reported as the most attended KubeCon ever. Meanwhile, CNCF’s local meetups and Kubernetes Community Days spread knowledge in regions around the globe, and special interest groups (SIGs)/topic-focused user groups continued to grow.

Crucially, end-user organizations (from fintech to retail to governments) now routinely serve on CNCF boards and committees, influencing the direction of the cloud-native ecosystem. The foundation even established an End User Technical Advisory Board to incorporate feedback from non-vendor adopters on real-world needs. This collaborative ethos, bringing vendors, open-source developers, and end-users together, has been key to CNCF’s longevity.

Impact on Cloud-Native and Open Source¶

Over ten years, CNCF’s impact on the tech industry has been profound. It’s no exaggeration to say CNCF helped make cloud-native computing ubiquitous. Prior to 2015, running large-scale distributed systems often meant relying on proprietary stacks or ad-hoc OSS tools. CNCF changed that by stewarding a constellation of open-source projects that form a de facto standard cloud-native stack. Technologies like Kubernetes and containerd (for scheduling and running containers), Envoy and Linkerd (for service connectivity), Prometheus (for monitoring), and dozens more are now the first choice for enterprises building modern applications. This common toolkit has enabled organizations to avoid reinventing the wheel for infrastructure instead focusing on delivering business value via applications. As the CTO of CNCF, Chris Aniszczyk, put it in 2017: “It’s important for CNCF to host foundational technology for cloud native computing… uniting it with Kubernetes and CNCF brings huge benefits to end users”.

Equally important is CNCF’s influence on open-source collaboration models. The foundation proved that competitors can come together in a neutral forum to jointly build and maintain critical infrastructure. The Kubernetes project alone has over 11,000 contributors from diverse companies, and its longevity and resilience have exceeded that of many single-vendor projects. CNCF provided the governance, IP management, and community culture that allowed such wide collaboration to flourish. Many companies have shifted their strategies to embrace open source as a result, donating internal projects to CNCF (like Huawei with CNCF sandbox project KubeEdge, or Intel with the SPIRE project) and investing engineers full-time to upstream development. The “CNCF model” of open, neutral governance has become an exemplar for other domains of software (e.g., in AI and data, projects are emulating CNCF’s approach under the Linux Foundation).

Another aspect of CNCF’s impact is the sheer scale of its community and education efforts. Through KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, CNCF built one of the world’s largest open source developer conferences, fostering knowledge exchange and a sense of shared community identity (“Team Cloud Native”). The foundation’s training and certification programs have upskilled tens of thousands of engineers, addressing a critical skills gap and fueling industry adoption. Moreover, CNCF’s emphasis on diversity and inclusivity (such as scholarships and encouraging underrepresented speakers) has helped set a positive tone in open source communities.

Finally, CNCF has had a catalytic effect on the cloud computing market itself. Cloud providers now offer managed services for CNCF projects (e.g., every major cloud has a Kubernetes service, and many offer hosted Prometheus/Envoy/Linkerd options). This has leveled the playing field for users, making it easier to run hybrid or multi-cloud environments with consistent tooling. It also pressured vendors to adhere to open standards (for example, passing Kubernetes conformance tests) which reduces lock-in. In essence, CNCF drove the industry toward more openness and interoperability. As of 2022, CNCF proudly noted it was “hosting and growing some of the world’s most successful open source projects… and there are no signs of this momentum slowing down”. The cloud-native paradigm, containers, microservices, DevOps automation, owes much of its standardization and popularity to CNCF’s efforts over the past decade.

Conclusion¶

From its launch with Kubernetes in 2015 to overseeing a vast landscape of projects in 2025, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s journey has been remarkable. In ten short years, CNCF has shepherded the rise of cloud-native computing from an aspirational concept to an industry standard approach. Along the way, it has built a vibrant community where global collaborators innovate on infrastructure together, and where end users, developers, and vendors are equal stakeholders in an open ecosystem. The foundation’s key achievements, graduating dozens of impactful projects, growing a worldwide contributor base, and fostering interoperability and education, have left an indelible mark on both the cloud industry and open source history.

As we celebrate CNCF’s decade of success, it’s clear that cloud-native thinking is now deeply ingrained in modern technology. Whether you’re spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, deploying a microservice with Envoy and gRPC, or monitoring an app with Prometheus, you’re benefiting from the work CNCF championed. The next decade will no doubt bring new challenges and technologies (serverless, AI, edge computing, and more), but if CNCF’s story so far is any guide, the foundation will continue to adapt and lead, ensuring that the spirit of collaborative innovation remains strong in the cloud-native era. Here’s to the next ten years of CNCF and the ongoing evolution of the cloud-native community!