Success often brings challenges for open-source projects. A strong following of users and contributors can help advance development efforts, but large communities are also prone to fragmentation that sometimes undermines the long-term vision.

Google LLC is keen to prevent that from happening with Kubernetes. To that end, the company has teamed up with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to create a new certification program for ensuring interoperability between different implementations of the project.

Kubernetes is a framework for managing software containers, which enable companies to run the same software in multiple computing environments, that Google open-sourced in 2014. Since then, it has emerged as the go-to tool for orchestrating containerized applications, which are rapidly growing in number as more enterprises adopt the technology. Several dozen tech firms offer value-added products that use Kubernetes to ease the management of such workloads.

The Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program, which officially launched this morning, aims to ensure that applications can be freely migrated between these offerings. The goal is to prevent companies from getting locked into one particular implementation, which could dampen adoption of the orchestration framework in the long run.

Certifying a product under the program requires using an automated test kit to demonstrate certain requirements are met. Most notably, the programming interface through which applications interact with a Kubernetes implementation must follow the same core specifications as the open-source version. Companies also need to offer “strong guarantees” that they’ll update their products as new versions of the project become available.

So far, 32 providers have certified their offerings. The lineup includes Google, Docker Inc., IBM Corp., Red Hat Inc. and most of the other big names in the container ecosystem.

The new certification program is only the latest sign of the growing industry support for Kubernetes. Previously, Docker made its commercial container platform compatible with the project despite the fact that it offers a competing orchestration tool called Swarm. And earlier, Kubernetes was integrated with the popular Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service suite.

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