Less than two years ago, version 1 of Kubernetes was released. Today, there are over 1,100 contributors in the Kubernetes community. This number does not even include members who are active in Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The community has grown globally and outside of Google, so much so, that this year more than 60% of all contribution was made by people outside of Google.¹

To generate such momentum and rapid growth is impressive but more impressive is the level of engagement from the community.

A quick BigQuery search on githubarchive database reveals that K8S community is the most engaged. I measured engagement by the number of comments/author in March 2017 for the repos that have greater than 500 authors.

The engagement is not even close when compared with other projects with public repositories. A quick search on the repositories that received the highest number of stars on GitHub results in Kubernetes in top 100 at#84. According to the last count, there are over 85M repositories on GitHub!

Network Effects 

I reckon that the enthusiasm and adoption will grow even faster in future. Besides fabulous technology, the reason for Kubernetes growth lies in behavioural and management science in the positive externalities of two-sided network effects -Enterprises adopting Kubernetes and engineering talent pool available. Today, LinkedIn shows over 13 thousand individuals associated in some way with Kubernetes. It will increase by manyfold in the coming months.

Successful Deployments

Successful production deployments such as the scale of Pokemon GO, Walmart running 200+ distribution centers on K8S, The New York Times deploying CI/CD pipelines, eBay pivoting to Kubernetes, ticketmaster achieving self-healing clusters, Concur deploying containers in hybrid environment, or dozens of other successful stories, will fuel the growth further and will result in even more vibrant community.

Despite the success stories, challenges remain in mainstreaming container adoption. According to the latest CNCF survey, networking is the inhibitor cited by the most respondents, a bigger roadblock than security, lack of vendor support, complexity, logging and storage²

Contiv @ KubeCon

Cisco is a platinum sponsor of KubeCon EU, a premier Kubernetes and cloud-native event. Contiv team will embark on a mission, in the historic city of Berlin, to tell the cloud-native community and enthusiasts the need to make container networking production-grade. Contiv makes containers the first class citizen in the datacenter with cloud native, containerized workloads running alongside traditional ones on virtual machines or bare-metal. For a more background on Contiv, please refer to my earlier blog.

Demos and hands-on training

At KubeCon, we will be demoing everything container networking -various backends such as overlays over VXLANs, Layer 2 over VLANs on native Kubernetes as well as OpenShift, design considerations, benefits and how to choose the right approach. We will set you up with the easiest path to adopt Contiv in your existing Kubernetes deployments. If you are just starting with Kubernetes or Contiv, we got you covered with step-by-step hands-on tutorials and guides. Policy-based automation is the key for speed and scale requirements of containerized applications. We will demo how you can create, and manage policies such as segmentation, traffic isolation or bandwidth allocation in a portable fashion from dev/test to production.

Contiv swag

Don't forget to load up on cool new Contiv swag. You never know when smartphone battery runs out while travelling and of course display your hip cloud-native cred with Contiv branded power bank!

Let's explore beautiful Berlin while getting fit! I hope to see many of you at the 5K running tour. Led by professional guides who specialize in Berlin running tours, explore the attractions of Germany's capital city from a new perspective. Sign up for this awesome CNCF sponsored activity here.

We are looking forward to engaging with all fellow Kubernauts. See you in Berlin, and in the meantime, please feel free to reach out.

Learn More:

1. Analyzing Kubernetes contributors at https://cncf.biterg.io/app/kibana#/dashboard/Overview
2. CNCF survey, November 2016. Use the raw data-file for further analysis
3. Getting started with Contiv has never been easier. Get the Contiv goodness into your existing or new Kuberbetes deployments today.