Back in 2018, Google announced that it would provide $9 million in Google Cloud Platform credits — divided over three years — to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to help it run the development and distribution infrastructure for the Kubernetes project. Previously, Google owned and managed those resources for the community. Today, the two organizations announced that Google is adding on to this grant with another $3 million annual donation to the CNCF to “help ensure the long-term health, quality and stability of Kubernetes and its ecosystem.”
As Google notes, the funds will go to the testing and infrastructure of the Kubernetes project, which currently sees over 2,300 monthly pull requests that trigger about 400,000 integration test runs, all of which use about 300,000 core hours on GCP.
“I’m really happy that we’re able to continue to make this investment,” Aparna Sinha, a director of product management at Google and the chairperson of the CNCF governing board, told me. “We know that it is extremely important for the long-term health, quality and stability of Kubernetes and its ecosystem and we’re delighted to be partnering with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on an ongoing basis. At the end of the day, the real goal of this is to make sure that developers can develop freely and that Kubernetes, which is of course so important to everyone, continues to be an excellent, solid, stable standard for doing that.”
Sinha also noted that Google contributes a lot of code to the project, with 128,000 code contributions in the last twelve months alone. But on top of these technical contributions, the team is also making in-kind contributions through community engagement and mentoring, for example, in addition to the kind of financial contributions the company is announcing today.
“The Kubernetes project has been growing so fast — the releases are just one after the other,” said Priyanka Sharma, the General Manager of the CNCF. “And there are big changes, all of this has to run somewhere. […] This specific contribution of the $3 million, that’s where that comes in. So the Kubernetes project can be stress-free, [knowing] they have enough credits to actually run for a full year. And that security is critical because you don’t want Kubernetes to be wondering where will this run next month. This gives the developers and the contributors to the project the confidence to focus on feature sets, to build better, to make Kubernetes ever-evolving.”
It’s worth noting that while both Google and the CNCF are putting their best foot forward here, there have been some questions around Google’s management around the Istio service mesh project, which was incubated by Google and IBM a few years ago. At some point in 2017, there was a proposal to bring it under the CNCF umbrella, but that never happened. This year, Istio became one of the founding projects of Open Usage Commons, though that group is mostly concerned with trademarks, not with project governance. And while all of this may seem like a lot of inside baseball — and it is — but it had some members of the open-source community question Google’s commitment to organizations like the CNCF.
“Google contributes to a lot of open-source projects. […] There’s a lot of them, many are with open-source foundations under the Linux Foundation, many of them are otherwise,” Singha said when I asked her about this. “There’s nothing new, or anything to report about anything else. In particular, this discussion — and our focus very much with the CNCF here is on Kubernetes, which I think — out of everything that we do — is by far the biggest contribution or biggest amount of time and biggest amount of commitment relative to anything else.”
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