Open source has long been the man behind the curtain in web-based computing. But with the meteoric rise of Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration system, the once-exclusive community has amassed a sizeable new membership.

As Kubernetes is leveraged as the foundation for an increasing number of critical enterprise technologies and enables the new industry standard of hybrid cloud, open-source participants are reckoning with both the challenge and opportunity of working within a new collaborative digital economy.

“The scale is coming from real adoption and businesses that are moving their applications into the cloud,” said Liz Rice (pictured), technology evangelist at Aqua Security Software Ltd. and program co-chair at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. “The end users who want to be part of the community actually want to contribute to the community.”

Rice spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Liz Rice in our Women in Tech feature.

The Kubernetes effect

In just a few short years since its historic graduation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes has already made a lasting impact on the market. Last year the tool saw customer commitment grow from 48 to 77 percent, with 83 percent of enterprises that engage with cloud-native tools using the container software in application deployments across all environments.

Kubernetes’ influence can be measured in significant integrations and investments from every leading cloud provider, the major acquisitions it informs across the market, and the scale of KubeCon itself. This year the event visited cities all over the world, giving CNCF global insight into Kubernetes and open-source utilizations.

“[In] China, one of the interesting things was the use of machine learning [and] Kubeflow. Electricity companies using machine learning on Kubernetes to predict demand,” Rice said.

The platform’s popularity also means a competitive number of vendor event programming submissions. As Kubernetes raises the visibility of open source, the community has seen a rise in interest from high profile participants.

“People like Airbnb [are] sharing what they’ve done to make their cloud-native deployments, their use of kubernetes successful — telling us how they’ve done this for real,” Rice stated.

Securing open source

The use cases that come out of these “mature startups” are some of the most interesting to Rice. Companies like Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc., and others are using available cloud-native components to meet challenges well beyond the scope of traditional architecture.

“They’ve got these massive-scaled technology problems, and Kubernetes is giving them — and the whole cloud-native community around it — the ability to do these kind of custom things that they need to do,” she said.

One of the challenges in a growing mainstream user base is a heightened need around cybersecurity. While each iteration of Kubernetes delivers a greater level of protection, Rice suggested that large organizations with higher vulnerability consider supplemental security to reinforce protections across the container life cycle.

“If you are an enterprise, particularly if you’re a financial user, media company, or government organization, you have much stronger requirements from a security perspective,” she said. “That’s where the open-source tooling on its own may not be sufficient.”

At Aqua, Rice and her team are working to support container protection efforts with kube-hunter, an open-source tool that discovers security issues in Kubernetes clusters by simulating attacks and providing custom reports on advisable preventive measures.

“It attempts to make network requests looking for things like the open ports. It will tell you if you’ve got some misconfigurations,” Rice explained.

In her book “Kubernetes Security: Operating Kubernetes Clusters and Applications Safely,” Rice details the potential risks in building with components derived from a fluid open-source repository and how Aqua technology can help to mitigate them.

“A lot of the security issues with Kubernetes come about through poor configuration. Kube-hunter can help you see whether it’s a complete disaster or fairly contained,” she said.

Problem-solving at scale

As the Kubernetes ecosystem scales with new enterprise customers and the technologies emerging to support them, changes in the open-source community are inevitable. Fortunately, the organic scale of Kubernetes has created productive ecosystem partners with significant value to contribute to the community, according to Rice.

This year Rice observed the positive impact of learnings shared from mature startups with smaller businesses in the open-source ecosystem. “We are seeing more traditional businesses like banks [that] want to shape functionality really quickly. They replicate that,” Rice stated.

Despite its challenges, the benefit of the Kubernetes ecosystem to a growing community is its evolving diversity of thought and solutions. Rice expects to see new innovations in the ecosystem in the coming years.

“It’s a real challenge trying to keep the community feel as this is growing so fast. Balancing what the contributors want to do, making sure they’re getting value, but also enabling vendors, end users, and every constituent to get something good,” Rice concluded.

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. (* Disclosure: Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE