Red Hat's Perspective on Kubernetes: A Successful Bet

--- title: " The Bet on Kubernetes, a Red Hat Perspective " date: 2016-07-21 slug: the-bet-on-kubernetes url: /blog/2016/07/The-Bet-On-Kubernetes author: > Clayton Coleman (Red Hat) --- Two years ago, Red Hat made a big bet on Kubernetes. We bet on a simple idea: that an open source community is the best place to build the future of application orchestration, and that only an open source community could successfully integrate the diverse range of capabilities necessary to succeed. As a Red Hatter, that idea is not far-fetched - we’ve seen it successfully applied in many communities, but we’ve also seen it fail, especially when a broad reach is not supported by solid foundations. On the one year anniversary of Kubernetes 1.0, two years after the first open-source commit to the Kubernetes project, it’s worth asking the question: **Was Kubernetes the right bet?** The success of software is measured by the successes of its users - whether that software enables for them new opportunities or efficiencies. In that regard, Kubernetes has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. We know of hundreds of real production deployments of Kubernetes, in the enterprise through Red Hat’s multi-tenant enabled [OpenShift](https://github.com/openshift/origin) distribution, on [Google Container Engine](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/) (GKE), in heavily customized versions run by some of the world's largest software companies, and through the education, entertainment, startup, and do-it-yourself communities. Those deployers report improved time to delivery, standardized application lifecycles, improved resource utilization, and more resilient and robust applications. And that’s just from customers or contributors to the community - I would not be surprised if there were now thousands of installations of Kubernetes managing tens of thousands of real applications out in the wild. I believe that reach to be a validation of the vision underlying Kubernetes: to build a platform for all applications by providing tools for each of the core patterns in distributed computing. Those patterns: - simple replicated web software - distributed load balancing and service discovery - immutable images run in containers - co-location of related software into pods - simplified consumption of network attached storage - flexible and powerful resource scheduling - running batch and scheduled jobs alongside service workloads - managing and maintaining clustered software like databases and message queues Allow developers and operators to move to the next scale of abstraction, just like they have enabled Google and others in the tech ecosystem to scale to datacenter computers and beyond. From Kubernetes 1.0 to 1.3 we have continually improved the power and flexibility of the platform while ALSO improving performance, scalability, reliability, and usability. The explosion of integrations and tools that run on top of Kubernetes further validates core architectural decisions to be [composable](https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html), to expose [open and flexible APIs](/docs/api/), and to [deliberately limit the core platform](/docs/whatisk8s/#kubernetes-is-not) and encourage extension.

Two years ago, Red Hat made a bet on Kubernetes. Looking back, the success of Kubernetes is measured by its users. Kubernetes has succeeded beyond expectations, and is widely used for improved delivery time, standardized application lifecycles, improved resource utilization, and more resilient applications. Kubernetes is based on building a platform for all applications by providing tools for each of the core patterns in distributed computing. Kubernetes has continually improved the power and flexibility of the platform while improving performance, scalability, reliability, and usability.