When Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, declared this year that Kubernetes had “crossed the chasm,” he had the data to back it up.

According to the CNCF’s “Project Journey Report,” 1,704 companies have participated in solutions for the container orchestration tool, represented by 24,000 information technology professionals who have made more than 1 million contributions to date.

That’s an impressive start for a technology that was initially released only five years ago, but what’s in store for 2020?

“It’s all about the data,” said Justin Warren, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in San Diego. “We’ve seen a lot of evolution in stateful sets and being able to manage state-based data within the Kubernetes ecosystem. But, there’s still a lot of very hard work on these quite hard problems to make it look simple.”

Warren was joined by co-hosts Stu Miniman and John Troyer and they discussed the key factors expected to influence Kubernetes in the coming year, including new tools for the platform and participation by major firms (see the full interview with transcript here).

Build cars, not engines

The need for simplification appears to be driving new releases within the cloud-native community. In February, Rancher Labs Inc. introduced k3s as a “lightweight” Kubernetes distribution designed to address demand for easy-to-manage clusters.

“Simplification is going to be an issue; it has to happen,” Troyer said. “At the end of the day, we need more things on top of the platform. People are still building engines, and I want them to build cars because not everybody can build the engine.”

The other factor influencing the Kubernetes ecosystem has been the involvement of major companies and developers who now contribute to open-source projects as a part of their jobs. The CNCF report indicated that the top two contributing companies — Google Inc. and Red Hat Inc. — accounted for 35% of Kubernetes contributions.

“It used to be that open-source was something that people just contributed to,” Miniman noted. “Now, the majority of people that contribute to open source do it as part of their job. It is often companies that are behind the scenes pushing people and dollars into these projects.”

Here’s the complete analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon:

Photo: CNCF