Open source has always been at the heart of Lagoon, guiding our work from the very beginning. We have always been dedicated to being an active participant in the open source ecosystem, both using and contributing to open-source projects.

As we continually improve Lagoon and work to broaden our community and user base, we realized that we could reach a wider audience by opening up our circle and “donating” our project to a foundation. The obvious choice was the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which has taken projects like Kubernetes from a sandbox to the well-known powerhouse it is today. It’s worth noting that there are other similar foundations out there (such as the Continuous Delivery Foundation, or the Apache Software Foundation), but at this stage in our journey, the CNCF is the one we think we align most closely with.

What does the CNCF do?

The CNCF’s mission is to “make cloud computing ubiquitous.” They help to guide projects, hold conferences, and grow the community.

Why did we choose the CNCF?

Because Lagoon can deploy anywhere, and many of our clients are looking to deploy to the cloud, we develop with cloud-native considerations in mind. Plus, our current focus is deploying to Kubernetes, so the foundation that fostered Kubernetes seems like the right place to grow Lagoon.

How do we utilize CNCF and other OSS projects?

Lagoon comprises or integrates with a lot of other cloud-native services, all of which are open source, and many of which are CNCF sandbox, incubating or graduated projects:

• Kubernetes and its related runtimes and services, of course
• Helm
• Harbor
• Open Policy Agent
• Fluentd
• Prometheus
• Operator Framework
• Cert Manager

The entire team strives not just to be consumers of open-source software, but to contribute back to the ecosystem as well, and we all have a long history of contributing to upstream projects.

What will it mean for Lagoon if it’s accepted into the CNCF as a project?

The purpose of donating Lagoon to the CNCF Sandbox is to help provide alignment with other projects that could benefit Lagoon’s users and ecosystem, to streamline some of the contribution, governance and IP concerns around open source projects and to help the Lagoon team to build a successful product. This means that amazee.io will still (initially anyway) be the major contributor to Lagoon, and the existing Lagoon team will continue to develop new features, maintain existing ones, and plot the vision and strategy for the project. As well as dedicating these resources to maintaining and improving Lagoon, amazee.io will still be making new feature contributions in partnership with their customers. Over time, one of the aims of this process is to bring more external organizational contribution to the project, so we foresee a future where there are more companies that know and love Lagoon the way amazee.io does, meaning more people from more industries and walks of life giving their input, which is essential for any product.

In our next post in this series, we’ll talk about the process of donating a project to the CNCF, and where we are in this process.