Google announced yesterday that it is giving Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) $9 million in Google Cloud credits. It will help continue its work on the Kubernetes container orchestrator and will be split over the next three years. It will help cover the infrastructure costs of building, testing, and distributing the Kubernetes software. Google also announced it will be passing off the operational control of the project to the community.
This move is significant because CNCF and Kubernetes community members will take over all responsibilities of day-to-day Kubernetes project operations. Before, Google had hosted nearly all the cloud resources that supported the project. As the Kubernetes community has grown, Google is now taking a step back and handing it all over to the community
The Kubernetes project runs between 150,000 containers on 5,000 virtual machines, so it can get costly to run everything. Since the launch of the project, the Kubernetes container registry has served nearly 130 million downloads. Kubernetes is used in massive scale production by several large businesses including Comcast, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Pinterest, The New York Times, and many more.
Dan Kohn, executive director of CNCF, said regarding the development, “With the rapid growth of Kubernetes, and broad participation from organizations, cloud providers and users alike, we’re thrilled to see Google Cloud hand over ownership of Kubernetes CI/CD to the community that helped build it into one of the highest-velocity projects of all time. Google Cloud’s generous contribution is an important step in empowering the Kubernetes community to take ownership of its management and sustainability – all for the benefit of the project’s ever-growing user base.”
At this time, it is unknown if Kubernetes plans on moving some of the infrastructure hosted by Google to another cloud, but it is a possibility.
