It’s seems that despite all their differences, there will soon be one thing that all cloud vendors have in common – that they are all a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Salesforce is now joining the foundation that manages Kubernetes and already includes the likes of Microsoft, VMware, Pivotal, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, and more. Those mentioned all joined this year, showing an alignment of the stars when it comes to vendors that offer some form of cloud infrastructure.
Salesforce is clearly the odd one out, given that it is a SaaS provider, but the appetite from customers for containerisation appears to have lured the CRM company into the space. 
The reasoning for this could be that containerisation tooling, such as Kubernetes can play an important role in allowing developers to control the development process for a faster and easier process.
Mark Interrante, SVP Engineering at Salesforce, and formerly of HPE and Rackspace, said: “We’ve seen how containerization simplifies the orchestration of software across a large fleet of servers. Kubernetes makes a great foundation for CI/CD which then improves our software delivery.”
Whilst it is about the ability to provide containerisation tooling, the move is also about ramping up Salesforce’s open source work.
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Interrante began his post on joining the CNCF by detailing how important open source has been to Salesforce, “when we built a SQL interface to HBase called Phoenix, it was clear there was more value in what the community could add to it, than if we kept it in-house. So we open sourced it with Apache and the project has since grown and matured immensely,” said the Salesforce SVP.
Salesforce wants to help with projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Linkerd, and so on, but it’s also good for the company’s image.
Open source is in vogue, it’s the golden ticket that every company wants to have. Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle and more are all talking up their open source contributions, partly as a way to dispel the notion of vendor lock in, but also because that’s what users want.
