Red Hat to Contribute Comprehensive Container Tools Collection to Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The continued importance of cloud-native applications in an AI and hybrid cloud-centric world demands an open, more accessible ecosystem of development tools. Today, we’re pleased to help drive cloud-native evolution further into the next-generation of IT with our intent to contribute a comprehensive set of container tools to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), including bootc, Buildah, Composefs, Podman, Podman Desktop and Skopeo.

Upon acceptance by the CNCF, the contributed tools will become hosted projects – alongside technologies like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Helm and many more – and part of a vendor-neutral foundation aligned with the projects’ technical interests. The tools will start as Sandbox projects, allowing end-users to contribute, collaborate, grow the project communities and mature the technology.

While already popular tools with strong user bases - with Podman Desktop having been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and Podman having 23.6k GitHub Stars - we believe as CNCF-hosted projects, these tools will continue to meet the needs of developers today while paving the way for container technologies to grow organically and evolve to meet the dynamic needs of tomorrow.

End-to-end open innovation

Artificial intelligence is exposing technological and operational gaps in the technology industry more than ever. To meet the changing needs of developers, Red Hat has been working to not only drive innovation at the workload level -- but also into core functions to better enable end-users to build and run these advanced and intelligent workloads.

Containers are a fundamental part of these workloads, existing at the center of today’s cloud-native infrastructure with Linux forming the core of each respective container. Through the contribution of these cloud-native container tools, users have better and more consistent access between Linux and Kubernetes. With Linux as the foundation, these tools provide users an end-to-end cloud-native stack to build, deploy and manage containers at scale across the hybrid cloud.

Customers who use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can utilize Podman, Buildah, Skopeo and more, knowing they are optimized for RHEL and RHEL supports them in production. The contributed container tools are the building blocks many cloud-native workloads rely on and Red Hat is committed to each project’s future as an open source technology, bringing flexibility, accessibility and enhanced security features to container development.

Guiding the next generation of cloud-native through collaboration

Open source is at the heart of everything Red Hat does, and we believe making the code available is just the first step. It’s the collaboration that truly defines open source and leads to groundbreaking innovation. Newer workloads are forcing application developers to innovate in ways that open source is uniquely positioned to help guide.

Projects like Podman are at the center of this innovation for container technologies and  Podman Desktop makes it accessible to the developers. That is why, while already a popular project, Podman is being submitted for contribution at the Sandbox level. Podman as a Sandbox project allows for the community to grow organically, fostering collaboration and growing the diversity of contributors and maintainers - ultimately making it a stronger technology. We believe the CNCF is the place to make this innovation happen in the open.

More information about these projects, including how to get involved, is below:

Podman, Buildah, & Skopeo

Source: https://github.com/containers/podman
Source: https://github.com/containers/buildah
Source: https://github.com/containers/skopeo
Community: https://podman.io/community 

Podman Desktop

Source: https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop
Community: https://discord.com/invite/x5GzFF6QH4

Bootc

Source: https://github.com/containers/bootc
Community: https://github.com/containers/bootc/discussions
Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#bootc:fedoraproject.org