GCP – Continuing our long-standing commitment to Kubernetes and CNCF

Investments in open-source software—like Kubernetes—return great benefits for everyone in the community. Today, we reiterated our commitment to the open-source Kubernetes community with a $3 million annual donation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the single largest financial contribution from any company to the organization. A continuation of our initial contribution in 2018, these credits will help ensure the long-term health, quality and stability of Kubernetes and its ecosystem. 

As the organization that oversees the Kubernetes project, CNCF uses these funds for testing and infrastructure for the Kubernetes project, all of which has been hosted on Google Cloud since it was conceptualized and founded. By hosting the project, each day, we support 100,000,000 container downloads, and each month, 2,300+ pull requests to the project trigger about 400,000 integration test runs, using over 300,000 core hours.¹

Taking a holistic approach to contributing to Kubernetes 

We strongly believe that sustaining the Kubernetes community requires holistic support, complete with financial, technical and in-kind contributions from a thriving ecosystem. We continue to contribute code to the Kubernetes project: in the last 12 months alone, Google made 128,000 total code contributions—10 times more than any other public cloud provider.² In addition, Googlers devote time to mentoring, education and championing the community. We believe that users of open source, particularly users of our size and scale, have a duty to contribute to the projects they use. This is how open source moves forward. This belief drives the contributions we make—and will continue to make—for a long time to come.

For instance, we are proud to collaborate with CNCF training and certification programs, which in 2019 alone, enrolled 98,000 people in its Kubernetes Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) and almost 13,000 people in its Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA) training, helping to increase Kubernetes’ reach and diversify the user and contributor communities. Every year, we host the Google Summer of Code, a program that gives college students the opportunity to build open-source projects while being mentored by leading open-source developers. This year we successfully piloted open-source summer internships during the pandemic! These kinds of activities go a long way toward increasing inclusion and diversity in innovative areas of tech, which can often seem impenetrable to aspiring engineers. 

Putting users first 

Today, more enterprise leaders are investing in open source-based solutions than ever before. Kubernetes in particular, is wildly popular, and in the five years since we open sourced it, is well on its way to becoming the de facto compute platform for cloud applications, gracefully solving the problem of application management that had bedeviled enterprises for decades. In just one year, Kubernetes use in production increased to 83%, up from 78% last year, based on a recent CNCF survey. 

Technology leaders want advanced solutions and they want choices. For those leaders, it’s important to pick a technology provider that shares those values, and has a history of shaping technology through open-source contributions. Google Cloud customers value our leadership in creating an open cloud and multi-cloud standards that give them choice and free them from proprietary lock-in. 

By partnering with CNCF, the hard work of developing, steering and promoting Kubernetes is shared among hundreds of companies, and thousands of individual contributors. We’re proud to be a co-founder of CNCF and a supporter of the Linux Foundation, and look forward to working together to promote open source for years to come. 

Want to learn more about Kubernetes? Watch the Kubernetes essentials YouTube series to learn more about the project or participate in hands-on training opportunities through our Kubernetes Qwiklabs.

^{1. https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/24/overall-project-statistics?orgId=1&var-period_name=Last%20decade&var-repogroup_name=All 
2. https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/}