A few weeks after the movers and shakers of the container movement banded together to form a consortium meant to help establish common standards for the fast-growing technology, the same companies are teaming up again under the banner of Google Inc. to establish another foundation with an even more ambitious goal: drive adoption among traditional organizations.

The alliance plans to accomplish that through the development of automation capabilities that can help make containers a more viable option in production environments with strict reliability and security requirements. The first and currently only project on the agenda is Kubernetes, the open-source orchestration tool that Google created to manage large-scale implementations of the technology.

The engine, which is based on the internal system that the search giant uses to power its most important services, not coincidentally marked what is hailed as its first production-ready release in conjunction with the announcement of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The update brings a host of major features to the table spanning every part of the stack.

Kubernetes now ships with a build-in load balancer, domain name system, basic monitoring functionality and a number of other essential management capabilities for large-scale environments. That feature set provides a common operational framework across the different namespaces that users can now create to segment their cluster into separate parts.

That’s useful in scenarios where multiple applications with different requirements share the same infrastructure, which is the norm in production installations. Kubernetes 1.0 doesn’t stop at that, however. The release also introduces the ability to group common containers within a partition into so-called pods that can be modified at the same time, which can potentially save many hundreds of actions per major update or rollback in large deployments.

And as if that wasn’t enough, those actions can now be performed without having to take the cluster offline, which in turn benefits the end-users who rely on those deployments for their work. That new orchestration functionality is  joined by native support for independent storage volumes, the most effective way to make data available to multiple containers, and a slew of performance enhancements.

All of that makes today the best possible time for Google to have spinned off Kubernetes into an independent foundation. Now that the engine is ready for use in the enterprise, it’s suddenly become essential to convince prospective adopters that its continued development won’t hinge on the whims of a single vendor, a consideration made especially important in view of the search giant’s competitive position.

Kubernetes has been adopted by both Microsoft Corp. and Amazon Inc., its two biggest rivals in the public cloud, along with numerous smaller providers that together account for a sizable portion – if not a majority – of container deployments. Moving the project under the auspices of an independent foundation will help ensure that users of those platforms won’t find themselves at a disadvantage against Google customers in the future.

Photo via Google