CNCF projects are the foundation of cloud native computing. In 2023 Oracle announced plans to donate $3 million in Ampere Arm®-based compute credits on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) per year for three years to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). How’s this program going? Last year, as new projects were onboarded, fewer than a quarter of those credits were used. What a difference a year makes. As more projects move to OCI, the CNCF reports usage has already surpassed last year’s total usage in just two months!
More than a dozen projects are using these credits now. Projects that are not only critical to the mission of the CNCF – like Linux training and certification – but critical to many developers and ops professionals building the next big thing, today. Widely used projects like OpenTelemetry, Longhorn, Crossplane and Jaeger are on OCI, as well as projects ideal for AI/ML workloads: Opea and PyTorch. Expect more projects to join these to keep innovations coming for developers around the world.
Oracle doesn’t just use open source, however, we also contribute. One example is Helm, a popular package manager for Kubernetes. Oracle is a key supporter of Helm, driving cloud-native adoption in Kubernetes and OCI. Oracle integrates Helm into OCI to enable seamless and scalable deployments for enterprise customers. We’re actively engaged in the development of Helm 4, which is shaping the future of the cloud-native ecosystem. Plus, Helm adoption within OCI has experienced remarkable growth, expanding from just 802 deployments in April 2023 to an impressive 120,000 deployments per month by February 2025.
This growth reflects not only OCI’s infrastructure reliability but also the growing trust in Helm’s scalability, security, and ease of use, particularly in Oracle Cloud’s ecosystem. As we see this adoption trend continue, Oracle is committed to providing enhanced support and new features to further simplify and scale Helm usage for enterprise users. Oracle remains committed to collaborating with the Helm community to ensure Helm continues to serve the needs of cloud-native developers. We’re excited to support the release of Helm 3.17 and continue contributing to this powerful tool.
Throughout the rest of 2025, we’ll enable more CNCF projects via contributions and credits. If you’re at KubeCon 2025 in London, be sure to stop by booth S200 and discover how Oracle partners with CNCF and actively contributes to open source initiatives. Learn how you can leverage resources for your own projects and become part of the growing cloud native ecosystem. We can’t wait to see you!