Serverless computing is cloud-native, but not all cloud-native technologies are serverless. Some may assume that developers building modern applications must choose serverless or containers, a virtualized method for running distributed applications.

But the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — home to Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration platform — wants everyone to know it’s not partial to either containers or serverless, and there’s room for both, and others, in next-generation enterprise technology.

“We love serverless in CNCF,” said Chris Aniszczyk (pictured), chief technology officer and chief operating officer of CNCF. “We just view it as another kind of programmatic model that eventually runs on some type of containerized stack.”

In fact, Kubernetes and serverless are getting increasingly chummy in the open-source community. For example, there is growing adoption of Knative, a Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy and manage serverless workloads.

The CNCF has a devoted serverless working group that has been churning out white papers. It’s also in talks with Knative about bringing some of the latter’s technology directly into CNCF.

Aniszczyk spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle. They discussed the maturation of Kubernetes and containers, as well as new approaches to serverless computing. (* Disclosure below.)

Knative brings Kubernetes to serverless

Knative and CNCF are kindred in the sense that they give users a lot of elbow room to choose their own adoption methods, according to Aniszczyk.

“It’s like a set of components that you can use to build your own sort of serverless framework,” he stated. “I think if you want to provide your own serverless offering, you’re going to need the components in Knative to make that happen.”

This can be seen with companies such as SAP SE and GitLab, which just announced a serverless offering based on Knative.

Thanks to companies offering managed Kubernetes in a similar fashion, enterprises are viewing it as a mature, stable technology, Aniszczyk pointed out.

“Part of that is the cloud providers are all offering managed Kubernetes, so it’s convenient for companies that are moving to cloud. And then on the distro front, OpenShift, PKS, Rancher — they’re all mature products,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s three-day coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. (* Disclosure: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE