The Kubernetes bandwagon continues to roll merrily along. Less than three months after the container orchestration management system released version 1.8, the latest version (1.9) is scheduled to drop today. Following closely on the heels of this month’s KubeCon event in Austin, Texas, the container storage orchestration platform’s foundation also gained 31 new members, and a recent RedMonk survey found that more than half of Fortune 100 companies were using Kubernetes in some form.

Anticipation in advance of the latest release and the increasing pace of adoption highlight an important new role for Kubernetes, positioned as a key enabling technology across powerhouse cloud players, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft and Google, along with data center infrastructures. Despite continued concerns about the technology’s complexity and how to monetize it, widespread acceptance may be a sign that this segment of the information technology enterprise is growing up.

“We’ve been talking about getting infrastructure to become boring. If I can look at the new release of Kubernetes and not freak out that I had to change a bunch of stuff, we’ve done it,” said Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower, pictured), staff developer advocate at Google Cloud Platform and a major authority on Kubernetes.

Hightower visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu). They discussed the technology behind Kubernetes, concerns about the tool’s complexity, container security, and monetization strategies in the open-source world.

This week, theCUBE features Kelsey Hightower as our Guest of the Week.

New features set for release

Whether developers such as Hightower will have to modify code bases or not, the latest Kubernetes release is a basketful of presents just in time for the holidays. Version 1.9 includes an application programming interface for workloads, beta Windows support, and early standards for new volume plugins and IPv6.

General availability of the new release APIs is important, because the influx of programmers is driving interest in building new tools on top of the Kubernetes platform. “Our whole platform is API-driven from the outset,” Hightower said. “You’re not necessarily writing apps at the very low level anymore. You’re writing way up here with a bunch of new abstractions.”

The high-level app coding is also raising concern that Kubernetes management is becoming difficult and complex. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes’ home, has been working on developer tools to enable easier use of the technology. These include Helm (chart management), Draft (streamlined development) and Brigade (event-driven scripting).

“Everything in life is too complex; everything you don’t understand is too complex,” said Hightower, shrugging off concerns about difficulty in managing the container tool. “What Kubernetes does is take all of that complexity and give it an API.”

Plans for stronger security

Another important enhancement for Kubernetes involves security. Project managers at KubeCon this month outlined new features for role-based access and identity management. These security tools are evolving in cloud platforms on Google and AWS, and the roadmap calls for further plugins for on-premises Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

Container security remains vulnerable inside layers where applications accept requests from users. Because this is where protection can go south quickly, new releases are focusing on identity and access controls and the declarative approach which is part of the Kubernetes structure helps. “I know that this is what’s running on these machines, and I can be assured of it,” Hightower said.

Revolving around the rapid adoption of Kubernetes is an ongoing debate about monetization in the open-source Linux ecosphere. Many developers believe that the value lies in partnerships built around the technology, rather than in the open-source software itself.

“Kubernetes sets the stage for technology partners,” Hightower said. “It’s kind of like Linux. How many people make money on Linux?”

Not many would be the correct answer to that question, although there are some notable exceptions. One is Red Hat Inc., the open-source enterprise infrastructure company with more than $2 billion in annual revenue and a market cap north of $15 billion. Red Hat built OpenShift on Kubernetes and has been instrumental in ushering the container orchestration tool into the enterprise.

The core problem, as documented in a Wikibon analysis earlier this year, is that once an open-source technology hits it big, the rest of the tech community piles in. Prices fall, and the model becomes less attractive as a future business. There is also a lot of hard, labor-intensive development work that is more easily supported by the larger tech community.

“Kubernetes represents the experiences of the Red Hats, the CoreOS and Googles of the world,” Hightower explained. “It’s less about changing the game but making the game available to everybody.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE