On Wednesday Google announced that it is granting $9M in Google Cloud credit to further the development of the Kubernetes container orchestration system.
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It was initially designed by Google and back in 2015 Google gave maintenance of Kubernetes’ development over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
“I’m pleased to see Google include lead project contributors in the ongoing management of the Kubernetes testing and serving infrastructure so we can all help support this critically important part of the project together,” said Tim Hockin, Principal Software Engineer, Google Cloud and co-lead of the Kubernetes project
Google cloud has been looking after control of the testing and infrastructure of the project. According to the announcement, Google Cloud is now assigning those tasks to the foundation and Kubernetes’ top contributors. To support this change, Google is also including a $9 million grant of Google Cloud credit, split over three years.
Since the establishment of Kubernetes, 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). And in that time, Kubernetes became one of the world’s most popular open-source projects. To put it in perspective, just last month, the Kubernetes container registry hosted by Google served 129,537,369 container images downloads of core Kubernetes components. That’s over 4 million per day—and a lot of bandwidth.
“Google’s significant financial donation to the Kubernetes community will help ensure that the project’s constant pace of innovation and broad adoption continue unabated. We’re thrilled to see Google Cloud transfer management of the Kubernetes testing and infrastructure projects into contributors’ hands—making the project, not just open source, but openly managed, by a free community”, said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
