What is the Kubernetes Release Cycle?

TL;DR - The Kubernetes release cycle is quarterly and unabated 1.xx major “minor” releases of “vanilla” upstream Kubernetes every three months could continue forever. You have to keep up, while also paying close attention to Kubernetes API object versioning. This relentless pace is the key ingredient in Kubernetes’ domination of the distributed infrastructure world.

There is no such thing as Kubernetes LTS (and that’s fantastic)

One of the questions we encounter when talking to those looking to leverage Kubernetes, especially for private on-prem DIY deployments, is simply “How do you stay up-to-date?”

This leads to a Kubistential awakening:

• Who really runs the Kubernetes community project?
• How consistent has their release cycle & quality been?
• Like Debian, Ubuntu or RHEL - does Kubernetes have a Long Term Support version – a Kubernetes LTS?
• What sort of effort is required of a cluster maintainer or product owner to keep up each time a new Kubernetes release comes out?
• What happens when a cluster owner doesn’t stay on top of updates?
• Are their plausible alternatives to inheriting the task of managing Kubernetes?
• And if the answer is simply “cloud,” is it safe to use “certified” Kubernetes platforms without getting locked in?

Let’s dive into a little bit of Kubernetes lore and figure out what’s going on behind a project whose most recent release notes were a whopping 1,890 lines long.

Kubernetes founding story and leadership background

The initial stewards of Kubernetes within Google established a strong open community around the project from the start, taking lessons both good and not so great from the Linux kernel project, Mozilla, Openstack, Chrome, and even the infamous node.js fork.

commit 2c4b3a562ce34cddc3f8218a2c4d11c7310e6d56
Author: Joe Beda <joe.github@bedafamily.com>
Date:   Fri Jun 6 16:40:48 2014 -0700

    First commit

If you’re coming to the party late, check out the nearly three-year-old Techcrunch article covering the Kubernetes 1.0 release. Read all the way to the end.

The effervescent open source community builder who leads the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, is a veritable silicon-valley fortune teller:

I predict this technology will be too good to resist, those who are not participating today will change their mind later.

Even Bryan Cantrill, the awe inspiring Joyent CTO and long-time unix genius, expressed a mea culpa to his open source anti-pattern screed after witnessing the Kubernetes communal birth.

Another secret and largely underappreciated ingredient to Kubernetes success is the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) releasing it under Apache-2.0, an open source license that inspires religious arguments over claims that it is an antidote to a long-brewing commercial software patent cold war among tech giants.

If you can catch Jim Zemlin when his guard is down and ask him what’s so special about all this, he’ll beam about the amazing legal feat of getting Alphabet, Inc to give away its nascent Kubernetes baby – all under a patent-protected open source license!

As it has grown, the various CNCF and Kubernetes contributors have maintained a famously collaborative, open and self-introspective community with surprisingly few bad actors. Which leads us to SIGs.

#job #kubernetes