Open-source advocates, learn the following lessons from Kubernetes success

Kubernetes is the top container orchestration solution at present. Created by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes or K8s continues to be the leader in containerization. It also remains to be an open-source project.

Its open-source nature is worth emphasizing since the success of Kubernetes is in a way related to the success of the open-source movement. It can be recalled that even Microsoft has already started embracing open source around the mid-2000s. Of note, Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Michelle Noorali has been involved in the Kubernetes community for quite some time.

 Advocates of the open-source movement can learn a thing or two from the success of Kubernetes. These lessons are not necessarily exclusive to Kubernetes, but they highlight the benefits of adopting attitudes and preferences that help make the open-source movement grow bigger and better.

Community over product or company

One of the best attributes of the Kubernetes community is its emphasis on building a community of users and developers. It is built on enabling collaboration instead of just letting enterprising entities take advantage of the open-source software for their accessory, derivative, or freemium products.

Here's an excerpt of the Kubernetes Community Values: "We are here as a community first, our allegiance is to the intentional stewardship of the Kubernetes project for the benefit of all its members and users everywhere. We support working together publicly for the common goal of a vibrant interoperable ecosystem providing an excellent experience for our users. Individuals gain status through work, companies gain status through their commitments to support this community and fund the resources necessary for the project to operate."

The commitment to the sense of community among Kubernetes adopters is demonstrated in a number of ways. For one, most users and developers, including for-profit companies, readily share information in dealing with Kubernetes problems. An online search for a troubleshooting guide on the "fatal: not a git repository error," for example, will likely point to the page of a company that offers Kubernetes-related products and services or a post by a Kubernetes developer-blogger.

There are also several Kubernetes discussion boards and chat groups that make it easy to get support on dealing with K8s issues like the git error. Aside from Stack Overflow and a few tech blogs, it is usually pages from Kubernetes-related companies that top search results for Kubernetes troubleshooting and assistance keywords. It is unlikely for adopters to withhold or offer for a fee K8s information and insights that would benefit the user community.

Unusual degree of openness

Matt Assay, a former principal at Amazon Web Services, suggests that the secret to Kubernetes' success is the project's unusual degree of openness. He believes that K8s adoption has been faster than what many tend to think mainly because of how open the Kubernetes community is.

"The secret to Kubernetes' popularity is no secret: community," says Asay. Kubernetes was not the first container orchestration solution to enter the market. Mesosphere and Docker were the first to be introduced. It was also not the only open-source container orchestration tool on the market when it debuted. What made it stand out, though, was its openness.

Other solutions were made open source, but they were leaning on instituting closed governance, which had the effect of discouraging competitors and contributors. Asay notes that when Google developed Kubernetes, it chose an unpopular tactic, which was to make K8s as open as it can possibly get.

RedMonk founder Steve O'Grady tweeted an insightful point regarding this openness of Kubernetes. "I'd state this more plainly: in a world in which k8s wasn't open-source, it's a niche product and many, many more workloads are welded to AWS than is the case today," O'Grady wrote.

It would have been highly unlikely for Kubernetes to be as widely adopted as it is now if it were not open source and not made as liberally open as it remains to be up to this day. It has become significantly easier to deploy K8s in various settings because of their widespread adoption and the kind of community it has created.

Good timing

Another important factor about the success of Kubernetes that can help further the open-source movement is timing. It is not enough to offer something open source with a great degree of freedom. Sometimes, even having a huge community of users and developers is not going to be enough to ensure the success of an open-source project.

While Kubernetes was not the first container orchestration solution to be made freely available to developers, it came at a time when the containerization revolution was about to take off. It was there when cloud transformation was maturing, which meant vendors were more open to considering it in their respective product catalogs.

K8s did not only become the leading container orchestration tool because it is open source, is supported by Google, and emphasizes the building of its community of developers and users. It enjoyed accelerated growth and adoption because it was there at the right time with the right features or attributes to entice developers and users.

Not fearing the possible backlash

An article on Analytics India Mag presents an interesting take on Google possibly getting disadvantaged by its decision to open-source Kubernetes. It argues that the success of Kubernetes has allowed competitors of Google, arguably the biggest contributor to the K8s project, to outcompete the tech giant. AWS and Azure are beating Google in the cloud race and are benefitting from the popularity of Kubernetes. AI development companies are also leveraging K8s for their testing and deployment activities, and are possibly one-upping Google in the AI game.

If Google were too fixated on clasping the dominant position in whatever field the company wants to enter into, Kubernetes would have not become the leader it is now. The fixation on being the market leader would pull back the gains of having an open-source project with a high degree of openness and a solid developer-user community.

 To date, Google has not expressed any regret in open sourcing K8s. It may have not gained much from the ascent of Kubernetes into something that is close to being an industry standard. However, it has given rise to a highly successful open source project that benefits everyone.

In summary

The undeniable success of Kubernetes helps open-source advocates realize that it is not just about the technology. A good vision-driven open source project is more likely to succeed if it is kept open and not held back by intentions of keeping it tethered to the advantage of a few parties. It also benefits from having an emphasis on the creation of an engaged community and being released with the right timing.