Since it’s inception in 2014, container orchestrator Kubernetes has gone from strength to strength. Providing the cloud resources that support the project development —namely CI/CD testing infrastructure, container downloads, and other services like DNS, all running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – it has quickly become one of the world’s most popular open-source projects.
In fact, not only do 54% of Fortune 100 businesses utilise Kubernetes in one way or another, but developers themselves have made nearly a million comments on the project in GitHub – showing that the popularity of Kubernetes isn’t confined to any one group of individuals; it is now an all-encompassing phenomenon.
To put it in perspective, just last month, the Kubernetes container registry Google Cloud Platform host served 129,537,369 container image downloads of core Kubernetes components. That’s over 4 million per day—and a lot of bandwidth!
It was great to hear Google Cloud recently announce that they are funding a $9 million grant in credits to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, in order to grow storage capacity and fun scalability testing. As such, in the coming months, all project operations will be transferred to be administered by members of the Kubernetes project who will take ownership of maintenance and day-to-day tasks.
I believe that all aspects of a mature open-source project—including its testing and release infrastructure—should be maintained by the people developing it.