Google have released Kubernetes v1, a production-ready version of the open source container orchestration system. The Linux Foundation, in combination with multiple industry partners, have also announced the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which aims to advance the state-of-the-art for building cloud and container native applications. Google have stated that the CNCF will be seeded with Kubernetes.
The features required for the Kubernetes v1 production-ready release were determined during a meeting of core Kubernetes contributors in February this year. The Google Platform Blog states that all of these requirements have been met with the v1 release, which contains code contributions from over 400 developers:
- 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
- Inspect and debug applications with command execution, port forwarding, log collection, and resource monitoring via CLI and UI
- Upgrade and dynamically scale a live cluster
- Partition a cluster via namespaces for deeper control over resources
- 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
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organisation dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, in combination with multiple industry partners also announced the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today.
This new organisation aims to advance the state-of-the-art for building cloud native applications and services, allowing developers to take full advantage of existing and to-be-developed open source technologies. Cloud native refers to applications or services that are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and micro services-oriented
Founding organisations of the CNCF include AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Switch SUPERNAP, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks. Other organisations are encouraged to participate as founding members in the coming weeks, as the organisation establishes its governance model. Google have stated that the Kubernetes codebase will be contributed to the foundation as a seed technology.
The CNCF plans to create and drive the adoption of a new set of common container technologies driven and informed by ‘technical merit and end-user value’ that is inspired by ‘Internet-scale’ computing. The foundation will look at open source at the orchestration level, followed by the integration of hosts and services by defining API's and standards through a code-first approach. The organisation will also work with the recently announced Open Container Project (OCP) and its container image specification. Beyond orchestration and the image specification, the CNCF aims to assemble components to address ‘a comprehensive set of container application infrastructure needs’.
Related to the Kubernetes v1 release, CoreOS have also released a preview version of their commercial Kubernetes platform Tectonic, which runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or on-premise, and CloudBees have released three Jenkins Kubernetes plugins to assist in the implementation of continuous delivery of containerised applications with the Jenkins continuous integration server.
Additional information on the Kubernetes v1 release can be found on the Google Compute Blog or the Kubernetes GitHub repository.