Google Donates Kubernetes To New Foundation

Google is contributing the Kubernetes open source container orchestration system it developed to a new foundation backed by some of the biggest names in the industry, including Cisco, VMware, IBM and AT&T.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will now manage and develop Kubernetes, which Google launched last summer. In a blog post, Google said Kubernetes reached the v1 milestone and is ready for production use. "While this is huge news, there's still much work remaining to build out the entire container toolset," the company said.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which will be run by the Linux Foundation, will focus on container-based computing. It will work to ensure Kubernetes continues to work on any infrastructure, and build new software "to make the entire container toolset more robust," Google said.

Other companies joining Google in launching the CNCF include Docker, Box, Cloud Foundry Foundation, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Huawei, Intel, Joyent, RedHat, and Twitter.

"By bringing together the open source community's very best talent and code in a neutral and collaborative forum, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to advance the state-of-the-art of application development at Internet scale," Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, said in a prepared statement.

The CNCF plans to focus first on open source orchestration, then look at "integration of hosts and services by defining APIs and standards through a code-first approach to advance the state-of-the art of container-packaged application infrastructure," according to the Linux Foundation's announcement.

Last week, Google announced that it joined the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate member and planned to focus on integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack's Magnum multi-tenant "containers-as-a-service" platform.

According to Google, more than 400 developers contributed to Kubernetes v1, which includes features for cluster management and reliability.

The CNCF also plans to work with the Open Container Initiative, which was launched last month by 20 organizations, including container rivals Docker and CoreOS, under the Linux Foundation.