The codebase for Google's Kubernetes open source orchestration system for Docker containers has been tagged v1.0.0 ready for the initial 'general availability' public release of the platform at OSCON next week on 21st July.
Kubernetes is an open source platform created by Google for managing containerised applications across a cluster of multiple hosts, and provides mechanisms for deployment, maintenance and scaling of applications. Core concepts within Kubernetes include: clusters, which are the compute resources on which application containers are deployed and run; pods - a 'collocated group of Docker containers with shared volumes', which are the smallest deployable unit within Kubernetes; replication controllers that manage the lifecycle of pods; services, which provide a single, stable name and address for a set of pods; and labels, which are used to organise and select groups of objects based on key/value pairs.
Brendan Burns, senior staff engineer at Google, merged the Kubernetes v1.0.0 code Git branch into master during the 11th July in preparation for the announcement of Kubernetes general availability at the OSCON conference. The 'Release 1.0.0. Candidate Two' notes on Github state that a large amount of documentation has been added to the project for the v1 release, including getting started guides, an initial debugging section of the user guide, and information on multiple examples of how to run applications on Kubernetes.
The v1.0.0. release notes also identify that a several bugs have been fixed, code 'clean-up' has occurred, and additional support for testing has been added (including improvements for end-to-end testing of every command available within the kubectl command line tool). Features mentioned in the release notes include automatically opening a firewall when creating a Google Cloud Engine load balancer, and adding polling to 'all node readiness' to overcome a problem when the continuous integration pull request builder was failing due to a DNS probing issue.
Several industry luminaries are predicting that the development primitives provided by Kubernetes will ensure the popularity of the platform. At DockerCon 2015 Brendan Burns presented a series of patterns for creating 'modular distributed systems' that can run on Kubernetes. Arun Gupta, director of technical marketing and developer advocacy at Red Hat, has published a series of blog posts with guidance for scaling Kubernetes-based applications using replication controllers. James Strachan, senior consulting software engineer at Red Hat, has also provided a number of demonstrations using Kubernetes alongside the fabric8 integration platform and Red Hat's OpenShift v3 PaaS.
Kelsey Hightower, product manager and chief advocate at CoreOS, recently stated on Twitter that he believes Kubernetes will facilitate collaboration within the application management space:
Kubernetes will be at the heart of many application management systems and will anchor collaboration in this space. #kubernetes
With the goal of increasing communication within this space, Patrick Reilly and Joseph Jacks of Kismatic Inc, in combination with Kelsey Hightower and GopherCon organisers Brian Ketelsen and Erik St Martin, have also announced the organisation of KubeCon, a conference dedicated to Kubernetes. KubeCon will run between the 1st and 4th of November 2015 in Denver, USA. InfoQ reached out to Joseph Jacks, and asked about the motivations for running KubeCon:
As a community-led and collaborative effort, KubeCon aims to bring together Kubernetes practitioners and enthusiasts to share best practices and learnings. We hope KubeCon contributes to driving the growth of the Kubernetes ecosystem through sharing insights with interested users and existing production deployment journeys.
Additional details of the upcoming Kubernetes v1.0.0 release can be found on the project's Github repository. The 'Kubernetes 1.0 launch' website also contains additional information, and is offering a live stream of the Kubernetes v1 launch event at OSCON next week.