July 21,2016
Happy first birthday to Kubernetes! One year ago today, Kubernetes was released and has quickly grown to become one of the highest velocity open source cloud-related projects. With more than 639 developers contributing to the project and 17,366 commits over the last 12 months, you could say Kubernetes has become a pretty important part of the cloud native stack.
Accepting Kubernetes as our first CNCF project helped us establish our reputation as a open source foundation driving development of cloud-native technologies. We have since accepted Prometheus and plan to accept more open source projects in the future.
“Kubernetes use has exploded in the last year. At the CNCF, we couldn’t be prouder of how this technology has shown customers a way to ship production class Cloud Native applications.” – Alexis Richardson, CNCF TOC chair, Weaveworks CEO
Kubernetes exemplifies what CNCF is looking for with projects. It’s already up and running and proven to solve a problem for cloud native applications. To learn more about projects that are well-suited to CNCF, check out our brand values and selection criteria, which Richardson spoke about at a recent Linux conference (slides).
One of CNCF’s key goals in working closely with the Kubernetes team is to ensure the project continues to move at high speed as smoothly as possible. Toward this end, as part of The Linux Foundation, CNCF recently brought in open source veteran and Linux Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman to discuss with the Kubernetes team strategies the Linux kernel team uses to maintain the highest velocity project in the world. Check out the video of Greg’s presentation.
Kubernetes and Its Origin
The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning “helmsman” or “pilot,” and that’s the role it fills in a container workflow, as it oversees and manages multiple containers at scale. Here is a great animated video that explains how Kubernetes achieves this.
Kubernetes (commonly referred to as k8s) was initially developed by Google as an open source platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of containers across clusters of hosts. Kubernetes was actually inspired by Google’s Borg, the system that Google uses to run its massive global infrastructure.
Fostering an ecosystem of components and tools that relieve the burden of running applications in public and private clouds, Kubernetes allows companies to quickly and efficiently respond to customer demand by:
- Deploying applications quickly and predictably;
- Scaling applications on the fly;
- Seamlessly rolling out new features; and
- Optimizing hardware by using only the resources that are needed.
For more on how much Kubernetes has grown over the last year, read guest post from independent Kubernetes contributor, Justin Santa Barbara.
Kubernetes 1.3 Release
- On July 6th, Kubernetes released its highly anticipated 1.3 version, which provides the ability to bridge services across multiple clouds (including on-prem), support for multiple node types, integrated support for stateful services (such as key-value stores and databases), and greatly simplified cluster setup and deployment on your laptop. To learn more about the new features, visit the Kubernetes blog.
- To learn about the detailed performance results from Kubernetes 1.3, visit this Kubernetes blog. It also describes Kubemark, a performance testing tool that has been integrated into the continuous testing framework to detect performance and scalability regressions.
- Additionally, Ben Kepes provided a great perspective in this ComputerWorld article on Kubernetes 1.3 features and benefits to customers and the larger cloud native ecosystem.
KubeCon, co-located with CloudNativeCon
- November 8-9, 2016 in Seattle
- Co-located with CloudNativeCon, the long-time community favorite, KubeCon, will gather leading Kubernetes technologists from multiple open source cloud native communities to further the education and advancement of container technologies, Kubernetes, and cloud native architectures.
- CloudNativeCon and KubeCon are accepting speaking proposals. Head here to submit a talk by August 5 if you’d like to become a speaker! More information on sponsorship and registration is available online.
We are excited to celebrate the first birthday of Kubernetes (#k8sbday) as this project was the first step in establishing CNCF as an organization that supports leading cloud native projects of production quality.