A host of cloud firms are teaming up to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with the goal of developing Kubernetes.

The cloud group includes Google, IBM, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco and Intel, as well as other firms which are also interested in promoting containers such as Docker, CoreOS Docker and the Linux Foundation.

According to Google, the body will work with open source and partner communities in order to manage the future development of Kubernetes.

The company wrote: "As a first step, we plan to seed the CNCF with Kubernetes. CNCF will govern the future open source development of Kubernetes and ensure it continues to work well on any infrastructure: public cloud, private cloud, or bare metal.

"But Kubernetes is just the beginning. CNCF will be guided by a technical committee who will engage open source and partner communities to build new software to make the entire container toolset more robust. They will also evaluate additional projects for inclusion in the foundation and ensure that the overall toolset works well as a whole."

Red Hat has said that the CNCF is vital for developing an ecosystem that develops interoperability and vendor-independent standards.

Kubernetes was developed to allow large applications to be split across multiple containers, its job is as a container orchestration platform.

The foundation announcement coincides with Kubernetes 1.0 version milestone and it is already being welcomed into the market.

Last week, Google joined the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate sponsor, partly due to the company aiming to make the Kubernetes the standard container manager in OpenStack. Further industry support has come from Hitachi Data Systems announcing support and community validation of it on its Unified Compute Platform converged infrastructure systems.