The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) continued its push to stabilize Kubernetes deployments with the launch of a conformance certification program.

The Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program is designed to ensure compliant application programming interfaces (APIs) can provide consistent Kubernetes services and interoperable support across vendor platforms.

Vendors wanting certification must use an automated test suite to demonstrate their ability to meet the program’s standards. The test suite was developed between CNCF, the Kubernetes community, and its Testing and Architecture Special Interest Groups.

The program launched with 36 vendors having gained certification. The list includes big names like Alibaba Cloud, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. These companies can place a “Certified Kubernetes” logo on their compliant products and use "Kubernetes" as part of their product name.

“The interoperability that this program ensures is essential to Kubernetes meeting its promise of offering a single open-source software stack supported by many vendors that can deploy on any public, private, or hybrid cloud,” said CNCF Executive Director Dan Kohn.

CNCF in September launched its Kubernetes Certified Service Providers (KCSP) program. The KCSP program is targeted at certifying vendors to help companies adopt Kubernetes as a container orchestrator.

Founding members of the KCSP program include Accenture, Booze Allen Hamilton, Canonical, CoreOS, Giant Swarm, and Samsung SDS.

CNCF houses more than a dozen open source projects, with Kohn deeming Kubernetes as its anchor project.

Other CNCF projects include Prometheus for monitoring; Open Tracing for application flow monitoring; Fluentd for logging; Linkerd for service mesh; gRPC for remote procedure calls; CoreDNS for service discovery; Containerd and Rkt for container runtimes; CNI for container native networking; Envoy for edge and service proxy; Jaeger for distributed tracing; and Notary and The Update Framework (TUF) for security.

Kubernetes has emerged as the most popular container orchestrator being used by enterprises. According to a survey conducted as part of a recent SDxCentral report on container and cloud orchestration, 64 percent of respondents said they were using Kubernetes, 36 percent said they were using Docker Swarm, and 18 percent said they were using Apache Mesos. Those surveyed were allowed to select multiple answers.