If there’s one statistic that neatly captures the rise of Kubernetes’ popularity in the enterprise as the container orchestration tool of choice, it might be from a session held this week at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.

The session involved an in-depth look at Project Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which originally became a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation family only a year ago.

The hall was a bit crowded, to say the least.

“The deep dive for Project Helm had more than 1,600 people inside their session,” said Dan Kohn (pictured), executive director of CNCF. “This was more than we had attending all of KubeCon in 2015 and 2016 combined.”

Kohn spoke with Stu Miniman and John Troyer, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego. They discussed the broader ecosystem supporting a wide range of CNCF projects and a migration of Kubernetes toward internally driven platforms as a service. (* Disclosure below.)

Inventors backed cloud-native vision

The growth of Kubernetes over the past five years has brought a host of companies and developers into the world of containerized applications and the cloud-native community. There are now 43 projects within CNCF, and the total number of contributors to Kubernetes is about the same as the number for the other 42 projects combined, according to Kohn.

Despite this lopsided margin, the cloud-native world has steadfastly maintained its own identity through the foundation, because that’s how the inventors of Kubernetes wanted it.

“Google had this technology, and if they had come to the Linux Foundation and said: ‘We want to call it the Kubernetes Foundation,’ we probably would have said yes to that,” Kohn recalled. “But the impact then would have been that all of these other technologies and approaches would have come in and said, ‘We need to become part of the Kubernetes Project.’ Instead, there was a vision of an ecosystem.”

Some major companies, such as Bloomberg LP, have leveraged the scale and flexibility of Kubernetes to create a platform as a service, or PaaS, for delivering managed information-technology services inside the organization. This trend will likely generate new solutions within the Kubernetes community, according to Kohn.

“It’s somewhat surprising there hasn’t yet been a level of consensus on what that common PaaS, the common set of abstractions, on top should be,” Kohn noted. “A ton of our members and developers are working towards building that winning solution.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. (* 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