For members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, there is no charge for certification. There is also no charge for non-profit organizations. For commercial organizations that wish to certify but don't want to become a CNCF member, the fee is the same as joining the CNCF.
A community distribution does not have a company behind it. For the purposes of certification, we treat community distributions/installers as non-profit organizations, so there is no charge. However, we do require an individual to complete the certification agreement so that we have an official contact (or multiple contacts) if your software falls out of compliance.
When a platform or distribution fails certification, the issue could be in the implementation or in the conformance tests. We use a tracking issue to record issues with the tests.
New platforms and distributions version 1.8 and higher can be certified. Already certified implementations version 1.7 remain certified as long as a newer version is certified at least once a year after the initial certification.
You can, but it requires membership in CNCF. Instead, you may be able to accomplish your goal of ensuring conformance simply by running the conformance tests on your private cloud. As long as you pass, your implementation is conformant. It can't be certfied unless you complete the participation form, but certification (and the ability to use the Certified Kubernetes mark) is probably unnecessary for an internal-only product.
From the bottom of the Kubernetes Distributions & Platforms spreadsheet:
- A vendor is an organization providing a Kubernetes platform or distribution.
- A product is a platform or distribution provided by a vendor.
- A platform is a Kubernetes service provided and managed by a vendor.
- A distribution is Kubernetes software that can be installed by an end user on to a public cloud or their own hardware.
Yes. Please email us at [email protected].