Last year we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes. Serving as the foundation for modern container orchestration and cloud native computing, Kubernetes has grown from its small beginnings into a large ubiquitous project supported by a thriving global community.
Thirty-three releases later and, as KubeCon approaches, it’s an opportune time to not only celebrate the project’s remarkable growth and new features, but also to recognize the, not always visible, collective efforts of the many contributors who ensure its continued health and evolution. This is an attempt to shine light on and express gratitude for the tireless work of the Kubernetes community.
The project’s origin story highlights the power of shared knowledge and experience. More than just code, the initial contributions included invaluable operational expertise that has redefined modern infrastructure. The community then amplified this foundation, pushing Kubernetes into new frontiers, evolving to include the cutting edge of technologies like GenAI and, as a consequence, creating a large and ever-growing ecosystem.
Kubernetes’ contributors understand that true strength lies in a community that blurs company boundaries, where anybody can contribute and everybody benefits. This collaborative environment fosters innovation, ongoing improvement and collective responsibility, ensuring the project’s sustainability and adaptability to new technologies and challenges without compromising quality or incurring technical debt.
Think of Kubernetes as a high-performance engine, one that countless contributors are continuously refining. To keep this engine running smoothly, the community, formed by individual contributors and engineers from different companies and across various organizations, is constantly under the hood, fine-tuning its core components.
For instance, we’ve collectively focused on optimizing the control plane for speed and efficiency. This means implementing features like:
- Consistent read from cache: By allowing the control plane to consistently retrieve information from a cache, we reduce the load on the core system and enable faster responses, especially critical in large clusters where the control plane handles a high volume of requests.
- Kube-apiserver API streaming: This enhancement enables faster and more efficient communication within the control plane by streaming data instead of sending large payloads at once, improving the flow of information and overall responsiveness.
This dedication to performance also extends to the data plane, the fabric that connects the different parts of your application. Here, advancements like:
- Kube-proxy nftables: The nftables framework in the Linux kernel to provide more efficient and flexible network traffic management within Kubernetes. This results in improved network performance and reduced resource consumption.
- Traffic distribution for services: This enhancement allows users to specify preferences for how traffic is routed to different services within Kubernetes. This enables more fine-grained control over traffic flow, leading to improved network reliability, efficiency and performance.
Of course, security is critical, and the community has strengthened Kubernetes’ defenses with enhancements like:
- Node authorization: This feature provides more granular control over which actions can be performed on each node in your cluster. By restricting permissions at the node level, it enhances security and protects your cluster.
Beyond raw performance and security, we’re committed to smoothing out the everyday bumps in the road, addressing user pain points like:
- IP exhaustion with multiple service CIDR: This enhancement allows Kubernetes to assign multiple CIDR blocks to services, increasing the available IP address space and preventing exhaustion, which is crucial for large deployments. This addresses a common challenge faced by users running large-scale applications on Kubernetes.
- Improving pod start-up reliability with crash loop backoff tuning: This helps prevent pods from getting stuck in a crash loop, speeding up the development life cycle, ensuring smoother and more predictable application deployments and updates.
As technology evolves, so must Kubernetes. We’re actively working together on features that allow you to adapt to new demands, such as:
- Enabling resource updates during runtime: This allows you to adjust resources for your containerized applications on the fly, improving performance and efficiency.
- Improving NUMA and topology manager awareness: This helps improve performance for applications that are sensitive to the underlying hardware topology.
- Enhancing the upgrade experience through coordinated leader election: This makes upgrading Kubernetes more reliable and less disruptive, minimizing downtime for your applications.
And it’s not just about optimizing the runtime environment; the community is also dedicated to improving the developer experience and ensuring the long-term health of the project. This includes advancements like:
- Go workspaces: This feature improves the organization and management of Go code within Kubernetes, making it easier to manage dependencies and ensure code quality. This contributes to the long-term maintainability and stability of the project.
These collaborative efforts ensure Kubernetes remains robust and adaptable, capable of meeting the ever-changing needs of the industry.
Join the Community
If you’re passionate about open source and Kubernetes and want to make a difference, consider joining the community. There are many ways to contribute, whether by writing code, reviewing pull requests or simply helping to answer questions on forums and mailing lists. Your contributions can help shape the future of Kubernetes and make it even better for everyone.
To learn more about Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem, join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in London on April 1-4.
Benjamin Elder also contributed to this article.
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The community, formed by individuals and engineers across various organizations, is constantly under the hood, fine-tuning its core components.