The Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra), the primary champion of the cloud infrastructure platform OpenStack, recently announced its intent to join the Linux Foundation. Though not entirely unexpected, the move is nonetheless a momentous occurrence, as OpenInfra was a one-time rival to the Linux Foundation’s homegrown subsidiary the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The latter was created to manage Kubernetes, which has emerged as a de factor competitor to OpenStack.

This move is expected to facilitate collaboration between OpenStack and Kubernetes, which would allow each platform to evolve in ways that are complementary to one other rather than redundant to each other. In the COSS landscape, a conciliation between competing camps creates opportunities for cloud infrastructure startups that can build around both technologies rather than having to choose one or the other.