SEATTLE – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – purposefully or not – used the opening keynote at this week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 event to tout just how big of an organization it has become.

Liz Rice, technology evangelist at Aqua Security, headed up the keynote proceedings that were dominated by updates on some of the now 32 CNCF projects. These included Prometheus, Containerd, Helm, and Envoy. Those projects live in three different tiers under the CNCF umbrella: Graduated, Incubating, and Sandbox.

That list's newest member was added today as etcd slid under that umbrella as an Incubating project. Etcd is the primary storage location for Kubernetes and needs to be established before Kubernetes can be run on a system.

Etcd was initially developed by CoreOS in 2013 and used as a container orchestration system before taking on its current job within the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Brandon Philips, who was CTO at CoreOS and is now on the technical staff at Red Hat, explained that the move into CNCF would open up new opportunities for the platform. That includes working with CNCF on third-party auditing and security features.

CoreOS itself was acquired earlier this year by Red Hat for $250 million. Red Hat, in turn, was acquired in late October by IBM for $34 billion.

CNCF Executive Director Dan Kohn said that discussions on brining etcd into the open source space actually began even before CNCF was formed.

Kubernetes on Deck

Of course, CNCF’s halo project is Kubernetes. The container orchestrator was the first project adopted by the organization, the first to achieve Graduation status, and it has become the cloud native infrastructure layer of choice.

The Kubernetes project last week released its latest 1.13 version, which was its fourth and final release of the year. And, perhaps highlighting the increased stability in the platform, the latest release was accomplished a few weeks shorter that its usual quarterly cycle.

The importance of Kubernetes to CNCF and the wider ecosystem is also why the project will have its own focus during the second day of keynotes at this week’s event as well as a separate roundtable discussion for the press and analysts in attendance. Those discussions are expected to focus on the latest update as well as a critical security flaw that was exposed last week.