Kubernetes has become the first member of CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) to graduate from an incubating status, signaling a strong commitment to code quality and security best practices.
When CNCF was founded in 2015, Kubernetes was its inaugural project. Today, the Kubernetes is contributed to by more than 11,000 developers and has over 75,000 commits on GitHub. Among the 1.5 million projects on GitHub, Kubernetes ranks second for authors, ninth for commitments, and is third in the top 30 velocity open source projects.
Top cloud providers today offer their own Kubernetes services, and it is used by renown organizations including Uber, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Lyft, eBay, Blackrock, etc. As reported by Redmonk, of the 71% Fortune 100 companies that use containers, 50% use Kubernetes as their container orchestration platform.
These things show how mature and resilient a project Kubernetes has become in just over two years. A voting process is held for a project to enter as an inception, incubating, or a graduated project. A project is accepted when two-thirds of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) votes for it.
For a project to graduate, it has to earn and maintain a Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge, have committers from at least two organizations, adopt the CNCF Code of Conduct, define a project governance and committer process, receive supermajority of votes from TOC.
Kubernetes earned the CII Best Practices Badge in 2016, and successfully fulfilled all the graduation criteria. The TOC voted for Kubernetes at Open Source Leadership Summit to become the first ever CNCF project to graduate.
The graduation status show that Kubernetes can manage container at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes. “As a graduate, Kubernetes is in an even stronger position to grow faster and sustain a vibrant, healthy and diverse technical community.”
“We would like to congratulate the Kubernetes project community that has worked with us sometimes as students, frequently as peers, and often as teachers. Kubernetes would not be where it is today without the attention and devotion so many have given it across the industry,” said Sarah Novotny, Google Cloud’s open source strategy lead.
