Black lives matter.
We stand in solidarity with the Black community.
Racism is unacceptable.
It conflicts with the core values of the Kubernetes project and our community does not tolerate it.
We stand in solidarity with the Black community.
Racism is unacceptable.
It conflicts with the core values of the Kubernetes project and our community does not tolerate it.
Author: Kiran "Rin" Oliver Storyteller, Kubernetes Upstream Marketing Team
Welcome to part one of a new series introducing the K8s-Infrastructure working group!
When Kubernetes was formed in 2014, Google undertook the task of building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for keeping the project running smoothly. The tools itself were open source, but the Google Cloud Platform project used to run the infrastructure was internal-only, preventing contributors from being able to help out. In August 2018, Google granted the Cloud Native Computing Foundation $9M in credits for the operation of Kubernetes. The sentiment behind this was that a project such as Kubernetes should be both maintained and operated by the community itself rather than by a single vendor.
A group of community members enthusiastically undertook the task of collaborating on the path forward, realizing that there was a more formal infrastructure necessary. They joined together as a cross-team working group with ownership spanning across multiple Kubernetes SIGs (Architecture, Contributor Experience, Release, and Testing). Aaron Crickenberger worked with the Kubernetes Steering Committee to enable the formation of the working group, co-drafting a charter alongside long-time collaborator Davanum Srinivas, and by 2019 the working group was official.
The team took on the complex task of managing the many moving parts of the infrastructure that sustains Kubernetes as a project.
The need started with necessity: the first problem they took on was a complete migration of all of the project's infrastructure from Google-owned infrastructure to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This is being done so that the project is self-sustainable without the need of any direct assistance from individual vendors. This breaks down in the following ways:
The most crucial problem the working group is trying to tackle is that the project is all volunteer-led. This leads to contributors, chairs, and others involved in the project quickly becoming overscheduled. As a result of this, certain areas such as documentation and organization often lack information, and efforts to progress are taking longer than the group would like to complete.
Some of the infrastructure that is being migrated over hasn't been updated in a while, and its original authors or directly responsible individuals have moved on from working on Kubernetes. While this is great from the perspective of the fact that the code was able to run untouched for a long period of time, from the perspective of trying to migrate, this makes it difficult to identify how to operate these components, and how to move these infrastructure pieces where they need to be effectively.
The lack of documentation is being addressed head-on by group member Bart Smykla, but there is a definite need for others to support. If you're looking for a way to get involved and learn the infrastructure, you can become a new contributor to the working group!
The team has made progress in the last few months that is well worth celebrating.
These are just a few of the things currently happening in the K8s Infrastructure working group.
If you're interested in getting involved, be sure to join the #wg-K8s-infra Slack Channel. Meetings are 60 minutes long, and are held every other Wednesday at 8:30 AM PT/16:30 UTC.
Join to help with the documentation, stay to learn about the amazing infrastructure supporting the Kubernetes community.