On behalf of the community, it’s our pleasure to announce that Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration system, has reached the v1 milestone (GitHub).  This important release, built by over 400 contributors, means Kubernetes is ready for production use.  While this is huge news, there’s still much work remaining to build out the entire container toolset.
Today, Google is joining together with the Linux Foundation and a stellar group of industry partners to develop the future of container-based computing.  Together we plan to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which will work with open source and partner communities to manage future development of Kubernetes and build new software that makes the entire container toolset more robust.

Kubernetes is now V1. 14,000 commits from 400 contributors
Last February, Kubernetes contributors got together in San Francisco and agreed on what the scope of 1.0 would be in terms of features, reliability, and supportability.  Today, we’ve achieved those goals.  Kubernetes is now production ready, with an impressive set of features:

App Services, Network, Storage
  • Includes core functionality critical for deploying and managing workloads in production, including DNS, load balancing, scaling, application-level health checking, and service accounts
  • Stateful application support with a wide variety of local and network based volumes, such as Google Compute Engine persistent disk, AWS Elastic Block Store, and NFS
  • Deploy your containers in pods, a grouping of closely related containers, which allow for easy updates and rollback
  • Inspect and debug your application with command execution, port forwarding, log collection, and resource monitoring via CLI and UI.   

Cluster Management
  • Upgrade and dynamically scale a live cluster
  • Partition a cluster via namespaces for deeper control over resources.  For example, you can segment a cluster into different applications, or test and production environments.

Performance and Stability
  • Fast API responses, with containers scheduled < 5s on average
  • Scale tested to 1000s of containers per cluster, and 100s of nodes
  • A stable API with a formal deprecation policy

In a single year, Kubernetes has become one of the most popular and successful open source projects, with over 14,000 commits from over 400 contributors, including developers from Red Hat, CoreOS, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, and many others.  

Customers are already running portions of their production infrastructure on Kubernetes:
“Enterprises trust Box to power collaboration and keep their information secure. Working with Kubernetes has opened up new possibilities for us in terms of application portability and operational agility. We continue to be impressed with the high quality and overall integrity of its technical governance and envision it becoming a core component of our infrastructure."

-- Sam Ghods, Co-founder & Service Architect, Box
“At eBay, we have been leading and innovating in building and operating one of the largest open private clouds in the world. The emerging landscape of containers and datacenter OS are creating unique opportunities for infrastructure providers and developers who want to seamlessly deliver cloud-first applications. We are excited to join Kubernetes foundation and lead the project in an open and community driven manner to help accelerate the pace of innovation and broad adoption of Kubernetes.”

-- Debashis Saha, Vice President of eBay Cloud Services
"We share Google's vision of enabling customers to create applications which are container packaged, dynamically scheduled, and micro-services oriented. We are already seeing customers reap the benefits of our investments in Kubernetes and Docker in terms of an improved developer experience, simplified operations, increased efficiency, and an overall increase in the agility and maintainability of applications."

-- Lars Herrmann, general manager, Integrated Solutions Business Unit and Container Strategy, Red Hat

"We operate a complex application ecosystem across a diverse global infrastructure footprint which spans both private infrastructure and public clouds.  We see Kubernetes as a leading technology that can significantly dial down the friction to create, deploy, operate, and migrate applications around enterprise infrastructure like ours.”


-- Richard Kaufmann, VP of Architecture at Samsung SDS Research America
"At Shippable, we've converted to Kubernetes for container orchestration and cluster management of the Shippable platform. We're now running more than one million containers per month on Kubernetes.  We were early adopters of Docker and, and as a result, had been a do-it-yourself shop for deploying and running containers for almost two years. Needless to say, we went through a lot of growing pains. Kubernetes has made managing our application and our infrastructure simple and reliable. Before Kubernetes, our developers collectively averaged 120 hours per week on operations-related tasks. Now, it's 2-3 hours, and really I'm being conservative. I only wish Kubernetes had been available two years ago."

-- Avi Cavale, CEO, Shippable
"We've been very excited about Kubernetes from the beginning because we saw in it the right architectural foundation, derived from Google's
operational experience, in the form of an open-source project with a high quality, engaged, and diverse community. We've been running Kubernetes in production for a while now, and have
been impressed at both how fast it has matured and the quality of the code being contributed to it."

-- Steve Reed, Principal Engineer, Core Engineering, Zulily
Cloud Native Computing Foundation: Google, Linux Foundation, and industry partners join together to define the future of container-based computing

Containers are changing the way that people deploy and manage applications; but we’re in the early days of cloud-native, microservice-based applications.  Together with the Linux Foundation and industry partners including Docker, IBM, VMWare, Intel, Cisco, Joyent, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Univa, Red Hat, and others, we are working on creating the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to make container-based computing easier.  

As a first step, we plan to seed the CNCF with Kubernetes. CNCF will govern the future open source development of Kubernetes and ensure it continues to work well on any infrastructure: public cloud, private cloud, or bare metal.

But Kubernetes is just the beginning.  CNCF will be guided by a technical committee who will engage open source and partner communities to build new software to make the entire container toolset more robust. They will also evaluate additional projects for inclusion in the foundation and ensure that the overall toolset works well as a whole.

To learn more about the CNCF, including its operating principles and how to join, visit the website.

Kubernetes Partner Announcements
Members of the Kubernetes ecosystem are also making exciting product announcements today at OSCON in Portland, including:

Get Started
Kubernetes runs on any platform, from public cloud providers to private infrastructure.  Learn more about our partners’ offerings or try Google Container Engine, a hosted and managed Kubernetes offering from Google. For more information, you can also watch the livestream of the Kubernetes 1.0 launch at OSCON here.

- Posted by Craig Mcluckie, Product Manager