The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a non-profit organization, affiliated with the Linux Foundation, that provides vendor-neutral governance for major open-source cloud infrastructure projects. The CNCF was established in 2015 around Kubernetes, which Google donated to create the foundation, and has since grown to host roughly 150 projects.
CNCF-hosted projects include Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, etcd, CoreDNS, Helm, Argo, and OpenTelemetry — the technical foundation of most modern cloud infrastructure stacks. CNCF graduation (the foundation's highest project maturity level) has become a de facto seal of enterprise readiness for infrastructure open source.
For AI-specific infrastructure, CNCF has been extending its scope to include ML and LLM tooling. KServe, KubeFlow, and various inference-serving projects are under CNCF governance. The CNCF ecosystem is the most vendor-neutral neighborhood in cloud open source, and its influence on enterprise infrastructure decisions is substantial.