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trivago joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

· 3 min read
trivago joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

“The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure. CNCF brings together the world’s top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences. CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation.” - CNCF

Last year, when visiting CloudNativeCon/KubeCon Europe in Barcelona (one of the biggest cloud-focused conferences in Europe), I noticed that there were some companies present in the exhibition space whose primary focus wasn’t software development. I was surprised to see companies from finance to sportswear as Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sponsors. There I discovered various CNCF membership types and learned about the End User Supporter membership.

One of my first thoughts was “trivago already uses some of these projects, why aren’t we here?“. I got really passionate about the idea of us becoming a CNCF member. My team and many others were using software coming out of the CNCF ecosystem like Kubernetes, Prometheus and gRPC (amongst others). So, I began to drive our membership with CNCF.

After getting in touch with the right people within trivago and explaining the value of joining CNCF as an End User Supporter to them, I found myself on the first call with CNCF a couple of weeks later.

Let me tell you why I campaigned for trivago to become a member:

  • Giving something back to the community. Libre / Open Source software is great and we love to use it. But we shouldn’t take it for granted. By becoming a member, we support projects in the scope of CNCF and the foundation itself.
  • Get more insights. The membership enables us to get a better overview of each project’s state and how it will evolve. We have the opportunity to watch the development of the software and give feedback. For example, if we ever missed a certain feature, we have the chance to get in touch with the right people.
  • Be part of a community. Being an End User Supporter, we get the chance to connect with other companies who are using software stacks similar to ours, which is a great thing for knowledge exchange! Ever wondered if someone else already used project x or y in production? Just ask the community and you’ll get some meaningful answers or get in touch with others who are in the same situation and share thoughts and gain new perspectives.

We’ve been part of the CNCF’s End User community since the end of 2019. We’re looking forward to collaborating internally and externally in the realm of cloud software. We’ve already started conversations on how to better adapt CNCF’s projects to trivago’s projects.