Google Cloud hands over Kubernetes project operations to CNCF, grants $9M in GCP credits

Google today announced that it is stepping back from managing the Kubernetes architecture and is funding the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) $9M in GCP credits for a successful transition. These credits are split over a period of three years to cover infrastructure costs. Google is also handing over operational control of the Kubernetes project to the CNCF community. They will now take ownership of day-to-day operational tasks such as testing and builds, as well as maintaining and operating the image repository and download infrastructure.

Kubernetes was first created by Google in 2014. Since then Google has been providing Kubernetes with the cloud resources that support the project development. These include CI/CD testing infrastructure, container downloads, and other services like DNS, all running on Google Cloud Platform.

With Google passing the reign to CNCF, it’s goal is to make make sure “Kubernetes is ready to scale when your enterprise needs it to”. The $9M grant will be dedicated to building the world-wide network and storage capacity required to serve container downloads. In addition, a large part of this grant will also be dedicated to funding scalability testing, which runs 150,000 containers across 5,000 virtual machines.

“Since releasing Kubernetes in 2014, Google has remained heavily involved in the project and actively contributes to its vibrant community. We also believe that for an open source project to truly thrive, all aspects of a mature project should be maintained by the people developing it. In passing the baton of operational responsibilities to Kubernetes contributors with the stewardship of the CNCF, we look forward to seeing how the project continues to evolve and experience breakneck adoption” said Sarah Novotny, Head of Open Source Strategy for Google Cloud.

The CNCF foundation includes a large number of companies of the likes of Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle, SAP etc. All of these will be profiting from the work of the CNCF and the Kubernetes community. With this move, Google is perhaps also transferring the load of running the Kubernetes infrastructure to these members. As mentioned in their blog post, they look forward to seeing the new ideas and efficiencies that all Kubernetes contributors bring to the project’s operations.

To learn more, check out the CNCF announcement post and the Google Cloud Platform blog.

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