An important inflection point is underway in the Kubernetes project. If you’ve taken a ride on a “startup rollercoaster,” this is a familiar story. You come up with an idea so crazy that it might work. You build it, get traction, and slowly clickity-clack up that first big hill. The view from the top is dizzying, as you’ve poured countless hours of life into something completely unknown. Once you go over the top of that hill, everything changes. Breakneck acceleration defines or destroys what has been built.
In my experience, that zero gravity point is where everyone in the company (or in this case, project) has to get serious about not only building something, but also maintaining it. Without a commitment to maintenance, things go awry really quickly. From codebases that resemble the Winchester Mystery House to epidemics of crashing production implementations, a fiery descent into chaos can happen quickly despite the outward appearance of success. Thankfully, the Kubernetes community seems to be riding our growth rollercoaster with increasing success at each release.
As software startups mature, there is a natural evolution reflected in the increasing distribution of labor. Explosive adoption means that full-time security, operations, quality, documentation, and project management staff become necessary to deliver stability, reliability, and extensibility. Also, you know things are getting serious when intentional architecture becomes necessary to ensure consistency over time.
Kubernetes has followed a similar path. In the absence of company departments or skill-specific teams, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) have organically formed around core project needs like storage, networking, API machinery, applications, and the operational lifecycle. As SIGs have proliferated, the Kubernetes governance model has crystallized around them, providing a framework for code ownership and shared responsibility. SIGs also help ensure the community is sustainable because success is often more about people than code.
At the Kubernetes [leadership summit](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/community/2017-events/05-leadership-summit) in June, a proposed SIG architecture was ratified with a unanimous vote, underscoring a stability theme that seemed to permeate every conversation in one way or another. The days of filling in major functionality gaps appear to be over, and a new era of feature depth has emerged in its place.