Salesforce is the fastest growing top five enterprise software company and the #1 CRM provider globally. And open source projects are one of the ways Salesforce has been able to build and scale our cloud infrastructure quickly and efficiently. For example, when we built a SQL interface to HBase called Phoenix, it was clear there was more value in what the community could add to it, than if we kept it in-house. So we open sourced it with Apache and the project has since grown and matured immensely. We’re seeing the same dynamic with containerization and service mesh technologies like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Linkerd, gRPC, and Istio. To help with these efforts we are joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Gold member!
It’s a good sign when developers are quick to adopt technologies, because it proves that they see how those technologies can help to create better products, faster and easier. Many of the CNCF technologies are being adopted across our teams at Salesforce. We’ve seen how containerization simplifies the orchestration of software across a large fleet of servers. Kubernetes makes a great foundation for CI/CD which then improves our software delivery. Our service mesh team latched on to gRPC and has already contributed features back into that community. This kind of collaboration, with Salesforce as an active participant in open technology ecosystems, is key to helping us move forward.
We’ve received great value from our membership in the Apache and Linux foundations. Joining the CNCF will provide similar benefits to us in the field of large-scale cloud technologies. These communities provide our engineers with support and opportunities to collaborate on projects critical to our infrastructure. Joining the CNCF better connects us to these next generation technologies that we now rely on.
I asked Randy Kern, our EVP of Infrastructure, for his thoughts:
We’re thrilled to be supporting the foundation that underlies much of our next generation infrastructure. The CNCF technologies are an exciting addition to our distributed systems architecture. We look forward to contributing to these technologies and participating in the community.
My team and I are excited to expand our use of the CNCF technologies and to contribute to their growth. We’ll share our progress with you here on our blog and on Twitter.
