5 Exciting Facts About Kubernetes On The Eve Of Its 5th Anniversary
post from Eric Brewer, VP Infrastructure and Google Fellow. This unassuming post talked about Google’s investment in containers such as support for Docker in Compute Engine VMs and the release of a container resource monitoring tool called cVisor.
What was also announced in same the post changed the face of modern infrastructure forever. Eric mentioned about a brand-new open source project from Google called Kubernetes.
This month, Kubernetes community is celebrating its 5th anniversary. Since its launch in 2014, this open source project took the industry by storm. Kubernetes got fantastic support from the whole industry, which resulted in the creation of a thriving ecosystem.
On the eve of its 5th anniversary, here are 5 interesting facts about the most popular open source project of our times:
1. Kubernetes is the darling of the open source community
Kubernetes won the hearts and minds of open source developers. After Linux, it is the most popular open source project of the community. Its contributors range from mainstream platform vendors to independent developers. The Github repository hosting Kubernetes code base has 2100 contributors 53,139 stars and counting.
There are hundreds of tools and add-ons built by the community that ease the use of Kubernetes.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is the custodian of Kubernetes projects, manages over 30 open source projects related to Kubernetes.
Major cloud providers and platform companies including Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware contribute to Kubernetes.
2. Kubernetes has created a new market and ecosystem
Kubernetes has become the middleware that is placed in between the infrastructure and applications. It abstracts the underlying physical and virtual resources enabling developers and operators to focus on managing applications instead of infrastructure.
In many ways, Kubernetes did to modern infrastructure what VMware did to the data center in the last decade. The rise of vSphere and VMware resulted in many new startups offering virtualized compute, network, and storage products. Between 2005 and 2015, VMware influenced the market through the creation of new segments and categories of products.
With the increased adoption of Kubernetes among enterprises, some startups are offering container-native networks, storage, and security products. Kubernetes is squarely responsible for the creation of this new ecosystem.
Startups such as Portworx and Tigera are leading the new wave of container-native storage and networking.
Portworx is solving some of the inherent problems involved in running traditional line-of-business applications on Kubernetes. It brings familiar storage operations to the cloud-native world, enabling administrators and operators to embrace the new paradigm. Portworx recently raised $27M Series C funding, which shows the investor confidence of this market.
Tigera, the founder of Project Calico – an open source container-native networking stack brings zero-trust network security to enterprises adopting Kubernetes. It enables organizations to scale cloud-native applications without compromising security and compliance.
The cloud-native ecosystem is one of the most vibrant communities growing at a rapid pace. From container registry to CI/CD tools to observability, hundreds of companies are offering product and services to make organizations adopting Kubernetes successful.
Kubernetes has managed to create a niche market that is worth billions of dollars.
In its early days, Kubernetes was perceived to be the choice of web-scale companies. Only those startups and companies that needed hyper-scale chose Kubernetes. However, within the first three years, Kubernetes made it to the enterprise data center.
Pearson, a global education company serving 75 million learners, has adopted Kubernetes to run some of the greenfield applications.
