Apple became a member of CNCF as Platinum end user
Recently, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced that Apple has become a Platinum member. CNCF believes that Apple has revolutionized personal and enterprise technology and has long been a pioneer in cloud-native computing and one of the early adopters of container technology. Apple also participated in several CNCF projects, including Kubernetes, gRPC, Prometheus, Envoy Proxy and Vitess, and hosted the FoundationDB Summit last year at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference.
“Having a company with the experience and scale of Apple as an end user member is a huge testament to the vitality of cloud native computing for the future of infrastructure and application development,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We’re thrilled to have the support of Apple, and look forward to the future contributions to the broader cloud native project community.”
At the same time, Apple’s senior engineering manager Tom Doron also joined the CNCF management committee. Apple’s actions in the open source field may not have caused too many repercussions like Google and Microsoft, but Apple actually contributed a lot. Simply list a few well-known projects:
- Web browser engine WebKit is owned by Apple, on which Apple develops Safari, Dashboard, Mail and other macOS applications;
- The main sponsor of the compiler architecture LLVM is Apple. The LLVM core library provides compiler-related support and can be used as a background for multi-language compilers for compile-time optimization of program languages, link optimization, online compilation optimization, and code generation.
- The two programming languages Objective-C and Swift are also from Apple, mainly used to develop iOS and macOS applications;
- Distributed transaction key-value database FoundationDB, which is a NoSQL database that supports ACID transactions;
- Document Layer is a document data model in the FoundationDB database. It extends FoundationDB as the core function of the Key-Value database and implements the MongoDB wire protocol.
- Apple’s macOS and iOS are based on the Darwin operating system, while Darwin’s kernel is XNU, and Apple has also opened XNU.