Today we are very excited to release our first Project Journey Report for Kubernetes. This is the first of several such reports we’ll be issuing for CNCF graduated projects. Here’s the backstory.
The largest CNCF-hosted project is Kubernetes. It is the most widely used container orchestration platform today, often described as the “Linux of the cloud”. CNCF’s efforts to nurture the growth of Kubernetes span a wide range of activities from organizing and running the enormously successful Kubecon + CloudNativeCon events to creating educational MOOCs and end user communities to certifying that different versions of Kubernetes are conformant. We even underwrite security audits. All of this is funded by CNCF’s membership dues and revenues from sponsorship and registration at our conferences.
We wanted to create a series of reports that help explain our nurturing efforts and some of the positive trends and outcomes we see developing around our hosted projects. This report attempts to objectively assess the state of the Kubernetes project and how the CNCF has impacted the progress and growth of Kubernetes. We recognize that it’s impossible to sort out correlation and causation but this report attempts to document correlations. For the report, we pulled data from multiple sources, particularly CNCF’s own DevStats tool, which provides detailed development statistics for all CNCF projects.
Some of the highlights of the report include:
- Actively contributing companies are up over 2000% from 15 active contributing companies prior to Kubernetes joining CNCF to 315 companies contributing to the project today with several thousand having committed over the life of the project.
- Number of individual contributors up over 7x since Kubernetes joined CNCF, from 400 contributors to over 3000 contributors.
- Code diversity across more and more companies – Google and Red Hat contributed 83% of Kubernetes code prior to the project joining CNCF. Today, Google and Red Hat contribute only 35% of code, even though the number of contributions they make continues to increase.
Since joining CNCF in 2016, Kubernetes has recorded:
- 24K contributors
- 148K code commits
- 83K pull requests
- 1.1M contributions
- 1,704 contributing companies
What’s more, we think that Kubernetes has a lot more room to run – as do many other CNCF projects that are also growing quickly.
This report is part of CNCF’s commitment to fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. Please read and enjoy the report, share your feedback with us – and stay tuned for more project journey reports for other projects.