The Bet on Kubernetes, a Red Hat Perspective
Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is from a Kubernetes contributor Clayton Coleman, Architect on OpenShift at Red Hat, sharing their adoption of the project from its beginnings.
Two years ago, Red Hat made a big bet on Kubernetes. We bet on a simple idea: that an open source community is the best place to build the future of application orchestration, and that only an open source community could successfully integrate the diverse range of capabilities necessary to succeed. As a Red Hatter, that idea is not far-fetched - we’ve seen it successfully applied in many communities, but we’ve also seen it fail, especially when a broad reach is not supported by solid foundations. On the one year anniversary of Kubernetes 1.0, two years after the first open-source commit to the Kubernetes project, it’s worth asking the question:
Was Kubernetes the right bet?
The success of software is measured by the successes of its users - whether that software enables for them new opportunities or efficiencies. In that regard, Kubernetes has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. We know of hundreds of real production deployments of Kubernetes, in the enterprise through Red Hat’s multi-tenant enabled
I believe that reach to be a validation of the vision underlying Kubernetes: to build a platform for all applications by providing tools for each of the core patterns in distributed computing. Those patterns: Allow developers and operators to move to the next scale of abstraction, just like they have enabled Google and others in the tech ecosystem to scale to datacenter computers and beyond. From Kubernetes 1.0 to 1.3 we have continually improved the power and flexibility of the platform while ALSO improving performance, scalability, reliability, and usability. The explosion of integrations and tools that run on top of Kubernetes further validates core architectural decisions to be
Today Kubernetes has one of the largest and most vibrant communities in the open source ecosystem, with almost a thousand contributors, one of the highest human-generated commit rates of any single-repository project on GitHub, over a thousand projects based around Kubernetes, and correspondingly active Stack Overflow and Slack channels. Red Hat is proud to be part of this ecosystem as the largest contributor to Kubernetes after Google, and every day more companies and individuals join us. The idea of Kubernetes found fertile ground, and you, the community, provided the excitement and commitment that made it grow. So, did we bet correctly? For all the reasons above, and hundreds more: Yes. What’s next? Happy as we are with the success of Kubernetes, this is no time to rest! While there are many more features and improvements we want to build into Kubernetes, I think there is a general consensus that we want to focus on the only long term goal that matters - a healthy, successful, and thriving technical community around Kubernetes. As John F. Kennedy probably said: > Ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community