Technische casestudy

CNCF saves $1 million annually by migrating to OCI

June 24, 2025 | 5 minuut gelezen

Authored by Erin Dawson, Sr. Developer Marketing Manager, Oracle

Image 1: CNCF is a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation founded in 2015 to support cloud-native computing.

If you’ve spent time in the open source community, you’ve likely heard of and benefited from Linux Foundation Education and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). With its mission to foster growth and evolve the cloud native and open source ecosystem, CNCF has a charter to promote the adoption of cloud native computing—a simple, yet profound order.

To pull this off, while also helping develop, maintain, and steward graduated projects, including Kubernetes, Helm, Argo, Prometheus, and ongoing professional training, CNCF and Linux Foundation Education need massive, cost-efficient cloud resources.

As part of its ongoing mission to contribute to open source projects and invest in open source technology at large, Oracle wanted to ensure that CNCF and Linux Foundation Education could fulfill their mission as the need for greater resources increased.

That’s why on November 7, 2023, Oracle announced its support for the Open Source Community at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon by donating Ampere Arm-based compute credits ($3 million per year for three years) to CNCF to foster innovative cloud native projects. Fortunately, Linux Foundation Education has been able to take advantage of these new credits to help improve cloud cost savings and flexibility.

Goals for cloud migration

Linux Foundation Education’s platform faced rising operational costs due to the growing demand for its hands-on training labs and certification exams, including the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exams. The existing infrastructure, built on a leading cloud provider, struggled to maintain cost efficiency as usage scaled.

Linux Foundation Education explored alternative cloud solutions to reduce costs and improve flexibility. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offered a significant opportunity, with a combination of cost-effective compute resources and a flexible infrastructure model. This was especially relevant in light of Oracle's donation of Arm credits for CNCF projects.

Customer’s solution on OCI

Linux Foundation Education’s team recognized the potential to use CNCF’s OCI Arm credits along with other OCI services to optimize its training and certification environments. This strategic move allowed Linux Foundation Education to expand the use of the donated credits beyond CNCF projects, supporting broader adoption of OCI. Linux Foundation Education used the following OCI services and technologies in this project:

OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE): OKE is a fully managed, scalable, and highly available service that you can use to deploy your containerized applications to the cloud. You specify the compute resources your applications need, and OKE provisions them on OCI within an existing tenancy. OKE uses Kubernetes to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts.
OCI Compute: The OCI Compute service allows you to provision and manage Compute hosts in the cloud. You can launch Compute instances with shapes that meet your resource requirements for CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and storage. After creating a Compute instance, you can access it securely, restart it, attach and detach volumes, and terminate it when you no longer need it.
OCI Block Storage: These Block Volumes provide reliable, high performance, low-cost block storage that persists beyond the lifespan of a virtual machine. They feature built-in redundancy and can scale to 1 PB per compute instance. Dynamic performance scaling with autotuning automatically adjusts.
OCI File Storage: A fully managed, elastic, enterprise-grade storage service that allows servers and applications to access data through shared file systems. Every file system scales automatically up to 8 exabytes and offers asynchronous replication, snapshot, and clone capabilities to simplify business continuity for enterprise applications.
OCI Virtual Cloud Network (VCN): A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an OCI region. Similar to traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN.

Migration path

Linux Foundation Education’s migration to OCI involved a structured approach:

Assessment: A thorough evaluation of the existing infrastructure was performed to identify potential migration challenges.
Proof of Concept (PoC): A representative workload—a beta exam-was used to validate OCI’s feasibility. Multiple Kubernetes clusters were deployed on OCI to simulate real-world conditions, and performance testing was conducted to compare the results with the baseline.
Phased Migration: A carefully planned, phased migration ensured minimal disruption to learners and test-takers.

Linux Foundation Education chose OCI due to the following advantages:

Cost efficiency: OCI’s flexible cost model, especially its ability to facilitate virtualization on OKE nodes, provided significant savings compared to the previous cloud provider.
Scalability: OCI’s infrastructure Linux Foundation Education to manage increasing demand without exponential cost increases.
Flexibility: OCI allowed for dynamic optimization of compute and storage resources.

Additionally, Oracle’s Go-Live Assurance Team worked closely with Linux Foundation Education’s Platform Engineers to ensure a seamless transition. This partnership was crucial in mitigating risks and maintaining service continuity during the busy season.

Results

After a successful migration, the focus shifted to continuous performance monitoring and optimization. OCI’s Go-Live assurance team collaborated again with Linux Foundation Education engineers to fine-tune the system for peak efficiency. Additionally, cost monitoring strategies were implemented to ensure ongoing financial sustainability through FinOps best practices.

The migration from the previous cloud provider to OCI resulted in substantial cost savings, estimated at $1 million annually. This optimization was achieved by transitioning to OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) with virtualization enabled on its nodes, allowing Linux Foundation Education to use OCI’s virtual machines efficiently. This approach offered a more flexible cost model compared to the previous provider's reliance on higher-cost instance types.

“Through our use of OKE and virtualization…[OCI’s] virtual machines have given us flexibility in our cost model,” says Marcus Robertson, Vice President, Educational Platforms, Linux Foundation Education.

Next steps

Linux Foundation Education continues to migrate additional workloads to OCI, including Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258) and Kubernetes for Developers (LFD259). Moving forward, the Linux Foundation Education team plans to migrate the full suite of hands-on training labs and exams, with the goal of reducing hosting costs by more than 50%.

To explore what Linux Foundation Education offers and perhaps take an exam yourself, check out these offerings, hosted on OCI.

Door Erin Dawson,

Sr. Developer Marketing Manager, Oracle