Kubernetes, which is the container orchestration system introduced by Google in 2014, is taking the next step in its evolution.
Throughout this period, Google has provided 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).
Since 2015, Kubernetes has been part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) under the direction of the Linux Foundation.
Google said now that Kubernetes has become one of the world’s most popular open-source projects, it is time to hand over control. Google hosts the Kubernetes container registry and last month it served 129,537,369 container image downloads of core Kubernetes components. That’s over 4 million per day—and a lot of bandwidth!
Google will hand over all project operations of Kubernetes to the community (including many Googlers), who will take ownership of day-to-day operational tasks such as testing and builds, as well as maintaining and operating the image repository and download infrastructure.
Under the new plan, Google will make a $9 million grant of GCP credits to the CNCF, split over three years, to cover infrastructure costs. In addition to the world-wide network and storage capacity required to serve all those container downloads, a large part of this grant will be dedicated to funding scalability testing, which regularly runs 150,000 containers across 5,000 virtual machines.
