The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), a part of Linux Foundation dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced early this month that Ant Group has been awarded the CNCF Top End User Award.

Twice a year, CNCF honors outstanding contributions from its end-user members who actively drive innovation and collaboration within the cloud native ecosystem. Recent recipients of this award include technology innovators such as Adobe, Spotify, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation, and Apple, as well as research institutes like CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, among others.

Ant Group is recognized for its contribution to open source technologies and scalable cloud infrastructure. Since becoming a CNCF End User Member in 2019, Ant Group has emerged as one of its top end user contributors—currently ranked fourth of all time and third in the past year.
TNGlobal recently talked to Wang Xu, Vice Chairman of the Open-Source Technology Committee at Ant Group, to learn more about this recognition where he also shared how Ant Group engage with the open source community, the company’s open source initiatives, among others.


Below are the edited excerpts: 



Congratulations on receiving the CNCF Top End User Award. What does this recognition mean to Ant Group and its technology development? What are the key milestones in your open source journey over the past two years that contributed to this achievement?

Winning this award is both motivating and encouraging for us. As open source is one of the core technology strategies of Ant Group, the recognition from one of the largest global developer communities means a great deal to us.
Ant Group has been working with CNCF for over six years and we have been using cloud native technology intensively for our business use cases. Our all-time code contributions have consistently ranked within the top 3-5 among all the End Users, and even in the top position in certain years.
Furthermore, the Dragonfly/Nydus project, in which Ant Group is actively participating, is finally reaching the last mile of incubation. We also contributed two new CNCF sandbox projects, KCL and KusionStack, enriching the platform engineering offerings.
We are extremely excited that these small and beautiful contributions were seen, acknowledged and recognized by the community.

How does Ant Group engage with the open source community? Can you share some of the programs or projects related to this?

Ant Open Source loves community. We actively collaborate with various community players to find mutually beneficial opportunities.
For example, we are members of OIF, CNCF, LFAI, FINOS and OpenAtom foundations. We have clearly observed that third-party, neutrally-governed projects are beneficial for the community in the long term. Hence. we made our projects available through the foundations to ensure technologies benefit more developers in a more sustainable manner.
Also, we collaborate with open source programs like Google Summer of Code (GSOC) and Open Source Promotion Plan (OSPP, in China) to support the development of software talents, and actively participate with global organizations like OpenChain or OpenWallet Foundations to establish open source supply chain standards and reference designs.

How do open source projects support Ant Group’s business development? Could you provide examples?

We believe open source to be a critical building block for the long-term excellence of Ant Group’s technology development.
As “trust” plays a fundamental factor for our business success, open source is an effective way to build and maintain trust with our customers and users, by allowing them to scrutinize the code quality of our technology stack. For example, with open-sourced Kata containers being used as the core containers in our cloud native ecosystem, one can easily tell that Ant Group is managing its related technologies in a secure and reliable manner.
Furthermore, open source also mitigates the risk of vendor lock-in, and serves as an effective product iteration methodology and go-to-market strategy. For commercial products like OceanBase or SOFAStack, offering an open-source version will allow more early-stage adopters and seasoned tech users to learn about the products. As their use cases become more sophisticated, they may opt for commercial licenses, and go through a seamless transition from open source technologies to commercial solutions.

Could you elaborate more on Ant Group’s engagement with open source community?

Ant Open Source has always been a community player. We are both a technology user and a contributor. In our production environment, we utilize a wide range of open source technologies and actively contribute back as well.
For example, in cloud native area, we use CNCF projects like Harbor, Prometheus, Argo, containerd, and etcd, while maintain one of the largest Kubernetes clusters by number of nodes per cluster. Meanwhile, we are actively contributing projects back to the community in areas which we had expertise on. Kata Containers, the secure container we used in our production cluster, has been a top project within Open Infra Foundation for years. As part of our overall containers pipeline, the Dragonfly/Nydus projects we are actively working on is about to graduate from CNCF.
In the past year, we also contributed DLRover to LFAI and KCL/KusionStack to CNCF as new sandbox projects. These contributions demonstrate our long-term commitment to the developer community.

Why do you think it is crucial for tech companies to embrace open source? What would you tell a tech company that has doubts about beginning to utilize and contribute to open source projects?

As previously discussed, we believe in open source as it is a catalyst to accelerate technology advancement, a mechanism to build long-term trust, and an effective product iteration and go-to-market (GTM) strategy when appropriate.

That said, it is understandable that some companies might hesitate on adopting open source as there is indeed an initial cost associated with it. As we sometimes describe, open source adoption might increase your short-term latency, but would significantly increase your long-term throughput if implemented right. For new adopters, we would recommend taking a phased approach adoption.

First, we recommend the company to become an open source user. In fact, it is nearly impossible for not using open source in your software supply chain nowadays. Second, try working with the community by making some upstream contributions, and build community connection that way.

Eventually, when opportunity emerges, open-source your own projects and make active contributions to the broader ecosystem. Overall, maintaining a solid, long-term strategy and continuously training engineers to be community-ready, will increase your success rate.

How do you see the evolving role of open source in the age of artificial intelligence? What are your thoughts on the development and trends of open source moving forward?

The evolution of Generative AI will likely bring a new wave of energy and evolution to open source and open ecosystems for two obvious reasons. First, the traditional definition of “open source” no longer fully applies to models and data used for training. Second, “participating in open source community” will not be the same because there are limitations to what can be done when working with “open source” models. The open source ecosystem will likely need iterations before new consensus can be formed.

That said, we observe clear trends moving forward. First of all, open source will still be the “open alternative” to close technologies and it will still evolve faster and more robustly compare to the close counterparts. Think about the different strategies of DeepSeek and OpenAI. While closed technologies might have the competitive advantage for a while, the open ones are rapidly catching up.

In this AI era, we are witnessing an influx of new projects, especially on the application layer, emerging every day. Many of them will have limited shelf life, but the so-called “Kubernetes in the new era” might be there in the wild, among all of the organic competitions and natural selections within the ecosystem. It is an era full of opportunities.

Ant Group has been actively working on Generative AI open source too. We see a future that GenAI technology and products will be built by everyone, and used by everyone in an inclusive manner. To embrace that future, we are continuously making our newest models, research findings, and product explorations in InclusionAI organization, to continuously bring small and beautiful open source technical changes to the world.

 

This article was written in partnership with Ant Group.