The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), an organization dedicated to the development of sustainable ecosystems for cloud-native software, recently recognized the contributions of Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation GmbH on behalf of Mercedes-Benz AG to the cloud-native ecosystem by awarding it the CNCF End User Award.
Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation GmbH, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz AG, develops digital products, advanced software solutions, and technological innovations for its parent company. At present, the company’s stack for Mercedes-Benz AG runs mostly on free and open source software (FOSS), which include a variety of CNCF projects such as Prometheus, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent, Helm, containerd, and more.
“We’re honored to be recognized by CNCF for our efforts, joining the likes of innovators like Apple, Didi, Intuit, Spotify, and Zalando,” says Joerg Schueler, CIO at Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation. “We’ve worked hard over the past eight years to provide an ecosystem that empowers our application teams. Today each team can get its own Kubernetes cluster, driven by APIs and self-service open source tools, making managing Kubernetes a community effort. In addition, with our OpenSource Manifesto, we have anchored FOSS in our corporate culture at Mercedes-Benz.”
Mercedez-Benz Tech Innovation adopted and began experimenting with Kubernetes early on in 2015, not long after it was open sourced in 2014. Looking to leverage the flexibility and scalability of Kubernetes-enabled cloud-native technology, the organization decided to forego its fully closed and proprietary software and go through a complete digital transformation.
A new grassroots cloud-native deployment was built by a small team of developers, running close to 1,000 Kubernetes clusters in production with Cluster API. The past year has seen this platform make the shift from an on-premises infrastructure to a multi-cloud infrastructure. What is notable about this achievement is that only 50% of end users run more than 10 clusters in production, according to the CNCF Annual Survey for 2022.
“Cloud Native End Users play a pivotal role in the cloud native ecosystem by providing valuable feedback and upstream contributions to open source projects,” says Taylor Dolezal, Head of Ecosystem at CNCF. “We are continually impressed by Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation’s dedication to cloud native and open source technology. Their team’s unwavering efforts in spearheading the adoption of new technologies for critical infrastructure in production environments set them apart.”
In the past few years, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation GmbH has consistently been among the top end user contributors to Kubernetes worldwide and has also been an active contributor to the Cluster API project and more. It joins over 145 organizations in the CNCF End User Community that regularly meet to discuss best practices and share feedback on ongoing and future projects.
