Who Contributes to Kubernetes?
Even though Kubernetes was established by Google, no singular company controls or owns Kubernetes. It is housed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is one of the largest sub-foundations of the Linux Foundation. This gives developers, creators, engineers and coders the ability to work within a structured environment on accepted projects free from typical vendor or platform constraints. Mailing lists, stack channels and events keep contributors knowledgeable, updated and active.
An open-source program is worked on by a variety of contributors that comment on code and create pull requests. There are currently around 35,000 contributors that have participated in the creation and alterations to k8s since 2014. Over 2,000 companies have been involved with more than a million contributions to the project.
This enables code diversity and agile growth. The platform shifts quickly and adapts to the most cutting edge ideas. More than a third of contributions to the project come from Google and Red Hat, according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
The diversity comes from developers all over the world. The United States and Europe are the largest contributors, but more than 28 countries, including China, India and Australia, have had regular contributors to the project.
Other graduated projects housed by CNCF include:
- Prometheus
- Envoy
- CoreDNS
- Containerd
- Fluentd
- Helm
- Harbor
- Vitess
- Jaeger
- TUF
The foundation also has a number of incubating projects as well as early “sandbox” projects. Projects shift in their maturity level as they prove sustainability and consistency. Projects have to have a healthy rate of committed contributors from a number of organizations and be following the CNCF Code of Conduct in order to advance. This helps ensure projects are stable and active within the foundation.