Contributor Blog on Kubernetes Contributors

KCD Around the World: New York

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0800

Welcome to KCD Around the World, a new series where we explore Kubernetes Community Days from every corner of the globe. When most people think of KCD, they think about talks and technical sessions, but behind every event is a community of volunteers, contributors, organizers and attendees who make it all happen. Through conversations with the people behind each KCD, we’ll share what makes it unique.

Our first stop: New York City. To learn what made this year’s event special, we interview Christopher Tineo, one of the organizers for KCD NY 2026.

Human-Centered Automation for Kubernetes Localization in the AI Era

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:00:00 -0800

This year, the Kubernetes localization subproject participated in LFX Mentorship for the first time through the project “CNCF - Kubernetes: SIG Docs Localization: AI-era localization automation” . The work was also tracked in kubernetes/website#54075 .

As the mentee on this project, I worked with Kubernetes SIG Docs localization mentors on a practical maintenance question:

In an era of rapidly improving AI translation tools, what kind of automation actually helps localization maintainers?

Kubernetes documentation is used by readers around the world. Localization helps make the project more accessible to users and contributors by providing content in their native languages. But localization is not only about translating pages once. It is also about maintaining those pages as Kubernetes changes.

Open source maintainership in the age of AI

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0800

AI has really changed the game around software development. More people are leveraging AI than ever to contribute patches to projects they use. To me, this is a good thing as more folks will contribute patches rather than fork or not fix them. The main problem is that AI has made generating code fast but there has been very little improvement in maintaining code bases. In this post, we will highlight the ways the Kubernetes community is adapting to the world of AI assisted coding.

Spotlight on WG Device Management

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0800

The rising popularity of AI, Edge, and Telecommunications workloads on Kubernetes has led to new requirements for hardware management. We now need hardware specification beyond CPU time and memory allocations. This includes allocating GPUs, TPUs, network interfaces, and other hardware, sometimes after pod start and occasionally through time-sharing.

Efficiently managing this specialized hardware is the mission of the Device Management Working Group . Their cornerstone project, Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) , recently graduated to GA, marking a fundamental shift in how the project handles hardware-intensive workloads at scale.

Spotlight on SIG Storage

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In our ongoing SIG Spotlight series, we shine a light on the groups that keep the Kubernetes project moving forward. This time, we catch up with SIG Storage , the group responsible for persistent data, volume management, and the interfaces that connect Kubernetes workloads to the storage systems beneath them.

We spoke with Xing Yang , Co-Chair of SIG Storage and Software Engineer at VMware by Broadcom, about the SIG’s history, the features shipping in recent Kubernetes releases, and where storage in Kubernetes is headed as AI workloads become the norm.

Eliminating Kubernetes Image Signature Replication

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The image promoter rewrite laid the groundwork for simplifying how Kubernetes delivers container image signatures. One of the rewrite phases (Phase 6) separated image signing from signature replication into distinct pipeline stages. This follow-up covers the next step: eliminating signature replication entirely.

The problem

After promoting container images to registry.k8s.io, the promoter signs them using cosign with keyless (OIDC) signatures. These signatures are stored as OCI artifacts alongside the images, tagged with the convention sha256-<digest>.sig and sha256-<digest>.att.

Announcing the AI Gateway Working Group

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The community around Kubernetes includes a number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs) facilitating discussions on important topics between interested contributors. Today, we’re excited to announce the formation of the AI Gateway Working Group , a new initiative focused on developing standards and best practices for networking infrastructure that supports AI workloads in Kubernetes environments.

What is an AI Gateway?

In a Kubernetes context, an AI Gateway refers to network gateway infrastructure (including proxy servers, load-balancers, etc.) that generally implements the Gateway API specification with enhanced capabilities for AI workloads. Rather than defining a distinct product category, AI Gateways describe infrastructure designed to enforce policy on AI traffic, including:

Spotlight on SIG Architecture: API Governance

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fifth interview of a SIG Architecture Spotlight series that covers the different subprojects, and we will be covering SIG Architecture: API Governance .

In this SIG Architecture spotlight we talked with Jordan Liggitt , lead of the API Governance sub-project.

Introduction

FM: Hello Jordan, thank you for your availability. Tell us a bit about yourself, your role and how you got involved in Kubernetes.

JL: My name is Jordan Liggitt. I’m a Christian, husband, father of four, software engineer at Google by day, and amateur musician by stealth. I was born in Texas (and still like to claim it as my point of origin), but I’ve lived in North Carolina for most of my life.

Announcing the Checkpoint/Restore Working Group

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The community around Kubernetes includes a number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs) facilitating discussions on important topics between interested contributors. Today we would like to announce the new Kubernetes Checkpoint Restore WG focusing on the integration of Checkpoint/Restore functionality into Kubernetes.

Motivation and use cases

There are several high-level scenarios discussed in the working group:

Optimizing resource utilization for interactive workloads, such as Jupyter notebooks and AI chatbots
Accelerating startup of applications with long initialization times, including Java applications and LLM inference services
Using periodic checkpointing to enable fault-tolerance for long-running workloads, such as distributed model training
Providing interruption-aware scheduling with transparent checkpoint/restore, allowing lower-priority Pods to be preempted while preserving the runtime state of applications
Facilitating Pod migration across nodes for load balancing and maintenance, without disrupting workloads.
Enabling forensic checkpointing to investigate and analyze security incidents such as cyberattacks, data breaches, and unauthorized access.

Across these scenarios, the goal is to help facilitate discussions of ideas between the Kubernetes community and the growing Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace (CRIU) ecosystem. The CRIU community includes several projects that support these use cases, including:

Ingress NGINX Retirement: What You Need to Know

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

To prioritize the safety and security of the ecosystem, Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee are announcing the upcoming retirement of Ingress NGINX . Best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026. Afterward, there will be no further releases, no bugfixes, and no updates to resolve any security vulnerabilities that may be discovered. Existing deployments of Ingress NGINX will continue to function and installation artifacts will remain available.

We recommend migrating to one of the many alternatives. Consider migrating to Gateway API , the modern replacement for Ingress. If you must continue using Ingress, many alternative Ingress controllers are listed in the Kubernetes documentation . Continue reading for further information about the history and current state of Ingress NGINX, as well as next steps.

Announcing the 2025 Steering Committee Election Results

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 15:10:00 -0500

The 2025 Steering Committee Election is now complete. The Kubernetes Steering Committee consists of 7 seats, 4 of which were up for election in 2025. Incoming committee members serve a term of 2 years, and all members are elected by the Kubernetes Community.

The Steering Committee oversees the governance of the entire Kubernetes project. With that great power comes great responsibility. You can learn more about the steering committee’s role in their charter .

Spotlight on Policy Working Group

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

(Note: The Policy Working Group has completed its mission and is no longer active. This article reflects its work, accomplishments, and insights into how a working group operates.)

In the complex world of Kubernetes, policies play a crucial role in managing and securing clusters. But have you ever wondered how these policies are developed, implemented, and standardized across the Kubernetes ecosystem? To answer that, let’s take a look back at the work of the Policy Working Group.

Spotlight on the Kubernetes Steering Committee

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This interview was conducted in August 2024, and due to the dynamic nature of the Steering Committee membership and election process it might not represent the actual composition accurately. The topics covered are, however, overwhelmingly relevant to understand its scope of work. As we approach the Steering Committee elections, it provides useful insights into the workings of the Committee.

The Kubernetes Steering Committee is the backbone of the Kubernetes project, ensuring that its vibrant community and governance structures operate smoothly and effectively. While the technical brilliance of Kubernetes is often spotlighted through its Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs) , the unsung heroes quietly steering the ship are the members of the Steering Committee. They tackle complex organizational challenges, empower contributors, and foster the thriving open source ecosystem that Kubernetes is celebrated for.

Post-Quantum Cryptography in Kubernetes

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The world of cryptography is on the cusp of a major shift with the advent of quantum computing. While powerful quantum computers are still largely theoretical for many applications, their potential to break current cryptographic standards is a serious concern, especially for long-lived systems. This is where Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) comes in. In this article, I'll dive into what PQC means for TLS and, more specifically, for the Kubernetes ecosystem. I’ll explain what the (suprising) state of PQC in Kubernetes is and what the implications are for current and future clusters.

Changes to Kubernetes Slack

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: We’ve received notice from Salesforce that our Slack workspace WILL NOT BE DOWNGRADED on June 20th. Stand by for more details, but for now, there is no urgency to back up private channels or direct messages.

~~Kubernetes Slack will lose its special status and will be changing into a standard free Slack on June 20, 2025~~. Sometime later this year, our community may move to a new platform. If you are responsible for a channel or private channel, or a member of a User Group, you will need to take some actions as soon as you can.

Spotlight on SIG Apps

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In our ongoing SIG Spotlight series, we dive into the heart of the Kubernetes project by talking to the leaders of its various Special Interest Groups (SIGs). This time, we focus on SIG Apps , the group responsible for everything related to developing, deploying, and operating applications on Kubernetes. Sandipan Panda (DevZero ) had the opportunity to interview Maciej Szulik (Defense Unicorns ) and Janet Kuo (Google ), the chairs and tech leads of SIG Apps. They shared their experiences, challenges, and visions for the future of application management within the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Spotlight on SIG etcd

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this SIG etcd spotlight we talked with James Blair , Marek Siarkowicz , Wenjia Zhang , and Benjamin Wang to learn a bit more about this Kubernetes Special Interest Group.

Introducing SIG etcd

Frederico: Hello, thank you for the time! Let’s start with some introductions, could you tell us a bit about yourself, your role and how you got involved in Kubernetes.

Benjamin: Hello, I am Benjamin. I am a SIG etcd Tech Lead and one of the etcd maintainers. I work for VMware, which is part of the Broadcom group. I got involved in Kubernetes & etcd & CSI (Container Storage Interface ) because of work and also a big passion for open source. I have been working on Kubernetes & etcd (and also CSI) since 2020.

Spotlight on SIG Architecture: Enhancements

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is the fourth interview of a SIG Architecture Spotlight series that will cover the different subprojects, and we will be covering SIG Architecture: Enhancements .

In this SIG Architecture spotlight we talked with Kirsten Garrison , lead of the Enhancements subproject.

The Enhancements subproject

Frederico (FSM): Hi Kirsten, very happy to have the opportunity to talk about the Enhancements subproject. Let’s start with some quick information about yourself and your role.

Spotlight on Kubernetes Upstream Training in Japan

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are organizers of Kubernetes Upstream Training in Japan . Our team is composed of members who actively contribute to Kubernetes, including individuals who hold roles such as member, reviewer, approver, and chair.

Our goal is to increase the number of Kubernetes contributors and foster the growth of the community. While Kubernetes community is friendly and collaborative, newcomers may find the first step of contributing to be a bit challenging. Our training program aims to lower that barrier and create an environment where even beginners can participate smoothly.

Announcing the 2024 Steering Committee Election Results

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 15:10:00 -0500

The 2024 Steering Committee Election is now complete. The Kubernetes Steering Committee consists of 7 seats, 3 of which were up for election in 2024. Incoming committee members serve a term of 2 years, and all members are elected by the Kubernetes Community.

This community body is significant since it oversees the governance of the entire Kubernetes project. With that great power comes great responsibility. You can learn more about the steering committee’s role in their charter .

Spotlight on CNCF Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Working Group (DHHWG)

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In recognition of Deaf Awareness Month and the importance of inclusivity in the tech community, we are spotlighting Catherine Paganini , facilitator and one of the founding members of CNCF Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Working Group (DHHWG). In this interview, Sandeep Kanabar , a deaf member of the DHHWG and part of the Kubernetes SIG ContribEx Communications team , sits down with Catherine to explore the impact of the DHHWG on cloud native projects like Kubernetes.

Spotlight on SIG Scheduling

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this SIG Scheduling spotlight we talked with Kensei Nakada , an approver in SIG Scheduling.

Introductions

Arvind: Hello, thank you for the opportunity to learn more about SIG Scheduling! Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your role, and how you got involved with Kubernetes?

Kensei: Hi, thanks for the opportunity! I’m Kensei Nakada (@sanposhiho ), a software engineer at Tetrate.io . I have been contributing to Kubernetes in my free time for more than 3 years, and now I’m an approver of SIG Scheduling in Kubernetes. Also, I’m a founder/owner of two SIG subprojects, kube-scheduler-simulator and kube-scheduler-wasm-extension .

Spotlight on SIG API Machinery

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We recently talked with Federico Bongiovanni (Google) and David Eads (Red Hat), Chairs of SIG API Machinery, to know a bit more about this Kubernetes Special Interest Group.

Introductions

Frederico (FSM): Hello, and thank your for your time. To start with, could you tell us about yourselves and how you got involved in Kubernetes?

David: I started working on OpenShift (the Red Hat distribution of Kubernetes) in the fall of 2014 and got involved pretty quickly in API Machinery. My first PRs were fixing kube-apiserver error messages and from there I branched out to kubectl (kubeconfigs are my fault!), auth (RBAC and *Review APIs are ports from OpenShift), apps (workqueues and sharedinformers for example). Don’t tell the others, but API Machinery is still my favorite :)

Spotlight on SIG Node

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the world of container orchestration, Kubernetes reigns supreme, powering some of the most complex and dynamic applications across the globe. Behind the scenes, a network of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) drives Kubernetes’ innovation and stability.

Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Matthias Bertschy , Gunju Kim , and Sergey Kanzhelev , members of SIG Node , who will shed some light on their roles, challenges, and the exciting developments within SIG Node.

Introducing Hydrophone

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the ever-changing landscape of Kubernetes, ensuring that clusters operate as intended is essential. This is where conformance testing becomes crucial, verifying that a Kubernetes cluster meets the required standards set by the community. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Hydrophone , a lightweight runner designed to streamline Kubernetes tests using the official conformance images released by the Kubernetes release team.

Simplified Kubernetes testing with Hydrophone

Hydrophone’s design philosophy centers around ease of use. By starting the conformance image as a pod within the conformance namespace, Hydrophone waits for the tests to conclude, then prints and exports the results. This approach offers a hassle-free method for running either individual tests or the entire Conformance Test Suite .

Spotlight on SIG Architecture: Code Organization

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third interview of a SIG Architecture Spotlight series that will cover the different subprojects. We will cover SIG Architecture: Code Organization .

In this SIG Architecture spotlight I talked with Madhav Jivrajani (VMware), a member of the Code Organization subproject.

Introducing the Code Organization subproject

Frederico (FSM): Hello Madhav, thank you for your availability. Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself, your role and how you got involved in Kubernetes?

Using Go workspaces in Kubernetes

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 08:30:00 -0800

The Go programming language has played a huge role in the success of Kubernetes. As Kubernetes has grown, matured, and pushed the bounds of what “regular” projects do, the Go project team has also grown and evolved the language and tools. In recent releases, Go introduced a feature called “workspaces” which was aimed at making projects like Kubernetes easier to manage.

We’ve just completed a major effort to adopt workspaces in Kubernetes, and the results are great. Our codebase is simpler and less error-prone, and we’re no longer off on our own technology island.

Spotlight on SIG Cloud Provider

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most popular ways developers use Kubernetes-related services is via cloud providers, but have you ever wondered how cloud providers can do that? How does this whole process of integration of Kubernetes to various cloud providers happen? To answer that, let’s put the spotlight on SIG Cloud Provider .

SIG Cloud Provider works to create seamless integrations between Kubernetes and various cloud providers. Their mission? Keeping the Kubernetes ecosystem fair and open for all. By setting clear standards and requirements, they ensure every cloud provider plays nicely with Kubernetes. It is their responsibility to configure cluster components to enable cloud provider integrations.

A look into the Kubernetes Book Club

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Learning Kubernetes and the entire ecosystem of technologies around it is not without its challenges. In this interview, we will talk with Carlos Santana (AWS) to learn a bit more about how he created the Kubernetes Book Club , how it works, and how anyone can join in to take advantage of a community-based learning experience.

Frederico Muñoz (FSM): Hello Carlos, thank you so much for your availability. To start with, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Spotlight on SIG Release (Release Team Subproject)

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Release Special Interest Group (SIG Release), where Kubernetes sharpens its blade with cutting-edge features and bug fixes every 4 months. Have you ever considered how such a big project like Kubernetes manages its timeline so efficiently to release its new version, or how the internal workings of the Release Team look like? If you’re curious about these questions or want to know more and get involved with the work SIG Release does, read on!

Blixt - A load-balancer written in Rust, using eBPF, born from Gateway API

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In SIG Network we now have a layer 4 (“L4”) load balancer named Blixt . This project started as a fun experiment using emerging technologies and is intended to become a utility for CI and testing to help facilitate the continued development of Gateway API . Are you interested in developing networking tools in Rust and eBPF ? Or perhaps you’re specifically interested in Gateway API? We’ll tell you a bit about the project and how it might benefit you.

Kubernetes supports running kube-proxy in an unprivileged container

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes how the --init-only flag to kube-proxy can be used to run the main kube-proxy container in a stricter securityContext, by performing the configuration that requires privileged mode in a separate init container . Since Windows doesn’t have the equivalent of capabilities, this only works on Linux.

The kube-proxy Pod still only meets the privileged Pod Security Standard , but there is still an improvement because the running container doesn’t need to run privileged.

Contextual logging in Kubernetes 1.29: Better troubleshooting and enhanced logging

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:30:00 -0800

On behalf of the Structured Logging Working Group and SIG Instrumentation , we are pleased to announce that the contextual logging feature introduced in Kubernetes v1.24 has now been successfully migrated to two components (kube-scheduler and kube-controller-manager) as well as some directories. This feature aims to provide more useful logs for better troubleshooting of Kubernetes and to empower developers to enhance Kubernetes.

What is contextual logging?

Contextual logging is based on the go-logr API. The key idea is that libraries are passed a logger instance by their caller and use that for logging instead of accessing a global logger. The binary decides the logging implementation, not the libraries. The go-logr API is designed around structured logging and supports attaching additional information to a logger.

Spotlight on SIG Testing

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to another edition of the SIG spotlight blog series, where we highlight the incredible work being done by various Special Interest Groups (SIGs) within the Kubernetes project. In this edition, we turn our attention to SIG Testing , a group interested in effective testing of Kubernetes and automating away project toil. SIG Testing focus on creating and running tools and infrastructure that make it easier for the community to write and run tests, and to contribute, analyze and act upon test results.

Kubernetes Contributor Summit: Behind-the-scenes

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Every year, just before the official start of KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, there’s a special event that has a very special place in the hearts of those organizing and participating in it: the Kubernetes Contributor Summit. To find out why, and to provide a behind-the-scenes perspective, we interview Noah Abrahams, whom amongst other roles was the co-lead for the Kubernetes Contributor Summit in 2023.

Frederico Muñoz (FSM): Hello Noah, and welcome. Could you start by introducing yourself and telling us how you got involved in Kubernetes?

Spotlight on SIG Architecture: Production Readiness

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second interview of a SIG Architecture Spotlight series that will cover the different subprojects. In this blog, we will cover the SIG Architecture: Production Readiness subproject .

In this SIG Architecture spotlight, we talked with Wojciech Tyczynski (Google), lead of the Production Readiness subproject.

About SIG Architecture and the Production Readiness subproject

Frederico (FSM): Hello Wojciech, could you tell us a bit about yourself, your role and how you got involved in Kubernetes?

A Quick Recap of 2023 China Kubernetes Contributor Summit

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On September 26, 2023, the first day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2023 , nearly 50 contributors gathered in Shanghai for the Kubernetes Contributor Summit.

All participants in the 2023 Kubernetes Contributor Summit

This marked the first in-person offline gathering held in China after three years of the pandemic.

A joyful meetup

The event began with welcome speeches from Kevin Wang from Huawei Cloud, one of the co-chairs of KubeCon, and Puja from Giant Swarm.

Spotlight on SIG Architecture: Conformance

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first interview of a SIG Architecture Spotlight series that will cover the different subprojects. We start with the SIG Architecture: Conformance subproject

In this SIG Architecture spotlight, we talked with Riaan Kleinhans (ii-Team), Lead for the Conformance sub-project .

About SIG Architecture and the Conformance subproject

Frederico (FSM): Hello Riaan, and welcome! For starters, tell us a bit about yourself, your role and how you got involved in Kubernetes.

Riaan Kleinhans (RK): Hi! My name is Riaan Kleinhans and I live in South Africa. I am the Project manager for the ii-Team in New Zealand. When I joined ii the plan was to move to New Zealand in April 2020 and then Covid happened. Fortunately, being a flexible and dynamic team we were able to make it work remotely and in very different time zones.

Announcing the 2023 Steering Committee Election Results

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The 2023 Steering Committee Election is now complete. The Kubernetes Steering Committee consists of 7 seats, 4 of which were up for election in 2023. Incoming committee members serve a term of 2 years, and all members are elected by the Kubernetes Community.

Spotlight on SIG ContribEx

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Fyka Ansari

Welcome to the world of Kubernetes and its vibrant contributor community! In this blog post, we’ll be shining a spotlight on the Special Interest Group for Contributor Experience (SIG ContribEx), an essential component of the Kubernetes project.

SIG ContribEx in Kubernetes is responsible for developing and maintaining a healthy and productive community of contributors to the project. This involves identifying and addressing bottlenecks that may hinder the project’s growth and feature velocity, such as pull request latency and the number of open pull requests and issues.

Spotlight on SIG CLI

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the world of Kubernetes, managing containerized applications at scale requires powerful and efficient tools. The command-line interface (CLI) is an integral part of any developer or operator’s toolkit, offering a convenient and flexible way to interact with a Kubernetes cluster.

SIG CLI plays a crucial role in improving the Kubernetes CLI experience by focusing on the development and enhancement of kubectl, the primary command-line tool for Kubernetes.

In this SIG CLI Spotlight, Arpit Agrawal, SIG ContribEx-Comms team member, talked with Katrina Verey , Tech Lead & Chair of SIG CLI,and Maciej Szulik , SIG CLI Batch Lead, about SIG CLI, current projects, challenges and how anyone can get involved.

Spotlight on SIG Network

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Networking is one of the core pillars of Kubernetes, and the Special Interest Group for Networking (SIG Network) is responsible for developing and maintaining the networking features of Kubernetes. It covers all aspects to ensure Kubernetes provides a reliable and scalable network infrastructure for containerized applications.

In this SIG Network spotlight, Sujay Dey talked with Shane Utt , Software Engineer at Kong, chair of SIG Network and maintainer of Gateway API, on different aspects of the SIG, what are the exciting things going on and how anyone can get involved and contribute here.

E2E Testing Best Practices, Reloaded

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

End-to-end (E2E) testing in Kubernetes is how the project validates functionality with real clusters. Contributors sooner or later encounter it when asked to write E2E tests for new features or to help with debugging test failures. Cluster admins or vendors might run the conformance tests, a subset of all tests in the E2E test suite .

The underlying E2E framework for writing these E2E tests has been around for a long time. Functionality was added to it as needed, leading to code that became hard to maintain and use. The testing commons WG started cleaning it up, but dissolved before completely achieving their goals.

From Zero to Kubernets Subproject Lead

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Getting started in any open-source community can be daunting, especially if it’s a big one like Kubernetes. I wrote this post to share my experience and encourage others to join up. All it takes is some curiosity and a willingness to show up!

Here’s how my journey unfolded at a high level:

What am I interested in? Is there a SIG (Special Interest Group) or a WG (Working Group) that is dedicated to that topic, or something similar?
Sign up for their mailing list and start hopping on meetings.
When (never if!) there are opportunities to help out and it aligns with your skills and desired growth areas, raise your hand.
Ask for lots of help and don’t be shy about not knowing everything (or anything!)
Keep plugging along, even if progress isn’t as fast as you would like it to be.

Starting up

First things first. What are you interested in learning more about? There are so many wonderful SIGs and working groups in the Kubernetes community: there’s something for everyone. And continuing to show up and participate will be so much easier if you think what you are doing is interesting. Likewise, continued participation is what keeps the community thriving, so that interest will drive you to have more of an impact.

Introducing KWOK: Kubernetes WithOut Kubelet

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Shiming Zhang (DaoCloud), Wei Huang (Apple), Yibo Zhuang (Apple)

Have you ever wondered how to set up a cluster of thousands of nodes just in seconds, how to simulate real nodes with a low resource footprint, and how to test your Kubernetes controller at scale without spending much on infrastructure?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you might be interested in KWOK, a toolkit that enables you to create a cluster of thousands of nodes in seconds.

Spotlight on SIG Instrumentation

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Observability requires the right data at the right time for the right consumer (human or piece of software) to make the right decision. In the context of Kubernetes, having best practices for cluster observability across all Kubernetes components is crucial.

SIG Instrumentation helps to address this issue by providing best practices and tools that all other SIGs use to instrument Kubernetes components-like the API server, scheduler, kubelet and kube-controller-manager.

In this SIG Instrumentation spotlight, Imran Noor Mohamed , SIG ContribEx-Comms tech lead talked with Elana Hashman , and Han Kang , chairs of SIG Instrumentation, on how the SIG is organized, what are the current challenges and how anyone can get involved and contribute.

Prow and Tide for Kubernetes Contributors

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors: Chris Short , Frederico Muñoz

In my work in the Kubernetes world, I look up a label or Prow command often. The systems behind the scenes (Prow and Tide ) are here to help Kubernetes Contributors get stuff done.

Labeling which SIG, WG, or subproject is as important as the issue or PR having someone assigned. To quote the docs , “Tide is a Prow component for managing a pool of GitHub PRs that match a given set of criteria. It will automatically retest PRs that meet the criteria (’tide comes in’) and automatically merge them when they have up-to-date passing test results (’tide goes out’).”

Implementing the Auto-refreshing Official Kubernetes CVE Feed

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Pushkar Joglekar (VMware)

Accompanying the release of Kubernetes v1.25, we announced availability of an official CVE feed as an alpha feature. This blog will cover how we implemented this feature.

Implementation Details

An auto-refreshing CVE feed allows users and implementers to programmatically fetch the list of CVEs announced by the Kubernetes SRC (Security Response Committee).

To ensure freshness and minimal maintainer overhead, the feed updates automatically by fetching the CVE related information from the CVE announcement GitHub Issues. Creating these issues is already part of the existing Security Response Committee (SRC) workflow.

Enhancements Opt-in Process Change for v1.26

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Grace Nguyen

Context and Motivations

Since the inception of the Kubernetes release team, we have used a spreadsheet to keep track of enhancements for the release. The project has scaled massively in the past few years, with almost a hundred enhancements collected for the 1.24 release. This process has become error-prone and time consuming. A lot of manual work is required from the release team and the SIG leads to populate KEPs data in the sheet. We have received continuous feedback from our contributors to streamline the process.

Spotlight on SIG Storage

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since the very beginning of Kubernetes, the topic of persistent data and how to address the requirement of stateful applications has been an important topic. Support for stateless deployments was natural, present from the start, and garnered attention, becoming very well-known. Work on better support for stateful applications was also present from early on, with each release increasing the scope of what could be run on Kubernetes.

Message queues, databases, clustered filesystems: these are some examples of the solutions that have different storage requirements and that are, today, increasingly deployed in Kubernetes. Dealing with ephemeral and persistent storage, local or remote, file or block, from many different vendors, while considering how to provide the needed resiliency and data consistency that users expect, all of this is under SIG Storage’s umbrella.

Meet Our Contributors - APAC (China region)

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors & Interviewers: Avinesh Tripathi , Debabrata Panigrahi , Jayesh Srivastava , Priyanka Saggu , Purneswar Prasad , Vedant Kakde

Hello, everyone 👋

Welcome back to the third edition of the “Meet Our Contributors” blog post series for APAC.

This post features four outstanding contributors from China, who have played diverse leadership and community roles in the upstream Kubernetes project.

So, without further ado, let’s get straight to the article.

Andy Zhang

Andy Zhang currently works for Microsoft China at the Shanghai site. His main focus is on Kubernetes storage drivers. Andy started contributing to Kubernetes about 5 years ago.

Enhancing Kubernetes one KEP at a Time

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Ryler Hockenbury (Mastercard)

Did you know that Kubernetes v1.24 has 46 enhancements ? That’s a lot of new functionality packed into a 4-month release cycle. The Kubernetes release team coordinates the logistics of the release, from remediating test flakes to publishing updated docs. It’s a ton of work, but they always deliver.

The release team comprises around 30 people across six subteams - Bug Triage, CI Signal, Enhancements, Release Notes, Communications, and Docs. Each of these subteams manages a component of the release. This post will focus on the role of the enhancements subteam and how you can get involved.

Spotlight on SIG Docs

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Purneswar Prasad

Introduction

The official documentation is the go-to source for any open source project. For Kubernetes, it’s an ever-evolving Special Interest Group (SIG) with people constantly putting in their efforts to make details about the project easier to consume for new contributors and users. SIG Docs publishes the official documentation on kubernetes.io which includes, but is not limited to, documentation of the core APIs, core architectural details, and CLI tools shipped with the Kubernetes release.

Contextual Logging in Kubernetes 1.24

Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors: Patrick Ohly (Intel)

The Structured Logging Working Group has added new capabilities to the logging infrastructure in Kubernetes 1.24. This blog post explains how developers can take advantage of those to make log output more useful and how they can get involved with improving Kubernetes.

Structured logging

The goal of structured logging is to replace C-style formatting and the resulting opaque log strings with log entries that have a well-defined syntax for storing message and parameters separately, for example as a JSON struct.

February 2022 Community Meeting Highlights

Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Nigel Brown (VMware)

We just had our first contributor community meeting this year, and it was awesome to be back with you in that format. These meetings will be happening on Zoom once per month, on the third Thursday of the month - that should be available in your calendar if you’re subscribed to the k-dev mailing list. Community meetings are an opportunity for you to meet synchronously with other members of the Kubernetes community to talk about issues of general appeal.

K8s CI Bot Helper Job: automating "make update"

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors: Subhasmita Swain , Davanum Srinivas

If you are contributing to the Kubernetes project and are developing on a Windows PC, it is conceivable that you will encounter certain issues that will cause your pull request to get held up by test failures. This article describes a workaround for a similar issue I encountered when attempting to have my modifications approved and merged into the master branch.

Why is this needed?

While contributing to kubernetes/kubernetes for some minor documentation changes, the pushed changes needed to be updated with other verified contents of the entire documentation. So, in order for the change to take effect, a single command must be performed to ensure that all tests on the CI pipeline pass. The single command make update runs all presubmission verification tests. For some reason on the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” environment the tests, specifically the update-openapi-spec.sh script, failed (in my case, take a look at the conversation here ), eventually failing the pull-kubernetes-verify tests.

Meet Our Contributors - APAC (Aus-NZ region)

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors & Interviewers: Anubhav Vardhan , Atharva Shinde , Avinesh Tripathi , Brad McCoy , Debabrata Panigrahi , Jayesh Srivastava , Kunal Verma , Pranshu Srivastava , Priyanka Saggu , Purneswar Prasad , Vedant Kakde

Good day, everyone 👋

Welcome back to the second episode of the “Meet Our Contributors” blog post series for APAC.

This post will feature four outstanding contributors from the Australia and New Zealand regions, who have played diverse leadership and community roles in the Upstream Kubernetes project.

SIG Node CI Subproject Celebrates Two Years of Test Improvements

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors: Sergey Kanzhelev (Google), Elana Hashman (Red Hat)

Ensuring the reliability of SIG Node upstream code is a continuous effort that takes a lot of behind-the-scenes effort from many contributors. There are frequent releases of Kubernetes, base operating systems, container runtimes, and test infrastructure that result in a complex matrix that requires attention and steady investment to “keep the lights on.” In May 2020, the Kubernetes node special interest group (“SIG Node”) organized a new subproject for continuous integration (CI) for node-related code and tests. Since its inauguration, the SIG Node CI subproject has run a weekly meeting, and even the full hour is often not enough to complete triage of all bugs, test-related PRs and issues, and discuss all related ongoing work within the subgroup.

Spotlight on SIG Multicluster

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors: Dewan Ahmed (Aiven) and Chris Short (AWS)

Introduction

SIG Multicluster is the Special Interest Group (SIG) focused on how Kubernetes concepts are expanded and used beyond the cluster boundary. Historically, Kubernetes resources only interacted within that boundary - KRU or Kubernetes Resource Universe (not an actual Kubernetes concept). Kubernetes clusters, even now, don’t really know anything about themselves or, about other clusters. Absence of cluster identifiers is a case in point. With the growing adoption of multicloud and multicluster deployments, the work SIG Multicluster doing is gaining a lot of attention.

Meet Our Contributors - APAC (India region)

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authors & Interviewers: Anubhav Vardhan , Atharva Shinde , Avinesh Tripathi , Debabrata Panigrahi , Kunal Verma , Pranshu Srivastava , Pritish Samal , Purneswar Prasad , Vedant Kakde

Editor: Priyanka Saggu

Good day, everyone 👋

Welcome to the first episode of the APAC edition of the “Meet Our Contributors” blog post series.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to five amazing folks from the India region who have been actively contributing to the upstream Kubernetes projects in a variety of ways, as well as being the leaders or maintainers of numerous community initiatives.

Announcing the Kubernetes Contributor Celebration 2021

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Contributor Celebration 2021

It’s that time of the year again, Yayy!!

Like last year, this year also we are back with Kubernetes Contributor Celebration, the annual end of the year celebration, to recognize our achievements and have some fun! It’s a time for us to relax, chat and do something fun with your fellow contributors!

Registration

To register, please fill out the Registration Form . More details on how to join the event.

Improve your documentation with Mermaid.js diagrams

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

By Chris Metz and Tim Bannister

Topics covered in this blog.

Live editor link: Topics Covered

Why are diagrams useful for documentation?

Friendly landing spot. Greeting readers with a page full of text can be intimidating to those new to Kubernetes, software engineering and tech writing.
Faster grasp of concepts. A diagram can serve as a visual roadmap for details covered in the accompanying text.

How to choose a SIG as a non-code Kubernetes contributor

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes contributors aren’t people in capes or part of some secret society. How to start committing to the GitHub repos that make up the project is well documented , yet it remains intimidating for many.

A few years ago, I spoke at an event and jokingly said, “Kubernetes is just a bunch of APIs and YAML… I’m a contributor; you don’t believe me?” After that talk, someone pulled me aside and asked if I was the Kubernetes contributor. They wanted to get involved in the community. Then came the real question, “I don’t know which special interest group (SIG) I would work in.”

From Kubernetes for work to Kubernetes for play

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Addendum by Matt Broberg on May 26, 2021

It's with a heavy heart that this story of Peeyush's contribution begins by acknowledging his sudden passing. Peeyush was a foundational member of the Upstream Marketing subproject. I saw his friendly face every Friday for over a year, and often chat about life before others joined the call. He was kind, incredibly funny, and a loving father. He was also an incredible technologist with years of hands-on experience with Kubernetes, but he spent his time building a space dedicated to communication and connection. He valued making all contributors feel like this community can be their home, and he was incredibly successful at it.

We lost a friend this week. If you're mourning that loss, know you're not alone. Whatever you do to honor him, may it be with as much kindness as he brought to others every day. We have started to collect some of our thoughts and memories of Peeyush as a memorial to him and what he brought to the community. If you would like to share some of your own, please open a PR adding your own memories of him.

My first encounter with Kubernetes was at my first job when a large banking customer wanted to evaluate Kubernetes on ppc64le architecture for application deployment. I was intrigued as it wasn’t every day when a bank seeks to consider something new! That was also my first interaction with Golang and I loved it instantly. I mean, who doesn’t love a cross compiled statically linked binary?! Before that, I was mostly working with Python and OpenStack, which are great as well. But Kubernetes opened a whole new world for me. Being familiar with Docker, which still was pretty new at that time, and the awesome cross-compilation capabilities of Go, I was quickly able to build a proof of concept, and my team loved it.

Announcing the Kubernetes Contributor Stories Series

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Kubernetes contributor community is vast. We have tens of thousands of members by any conservative estimate and many hundreds involved day-to-day. We are from all around the world, all kinds of backgrounds, all types of expertise, and we are all Kubernetes contributors.

We also have this amazing new website dedicated specifically to Kubernetes contributors. With that in mind, let’s combine the two.

We are asking any and all contributors to share their unique story to highlight the many ways they show up to be part of the Kubernetes community. Here are some

Contributing to the Development Guide

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When most people think of contributing to an open source project, I suspect they probably think of contributing code changes, new features, and bug fixes. As a software engineer and a long-time open source user and contributor, that’s certainly what I thought. Although I have written a good quantity of documentation in different workflows, the massive size of the Kubernetes community was a new kind of “client.” I just didn’t know what to expect when Google asked my compatriots and me at Lion’s Way to make much-needed updates to the Kubernetes Development Guide.

Announcing the Contributor Website

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to kubernetes.dev , the Kubernetes Contributor website; built to become the one stop shop for Kubernetes contributor content and news. It brings important documentation scattered throughout the project into one central location.

Resources for contributors

At launch, the contributor site will host a subset of our documentation. Some highlights include (with short links in parenthesis):

Our contributor guide (k8s.dev/guide ) walks you through the first steps to becoming a contributor
The contributor cheatsheet (k8s.dev/cheatsheet ) has common tips and tricks for regular contribution
The community calendar (k8s.dev/calendar ) shows all the upcoming community group meetings
Current release cycle information (k8s.dev/release ) lets you stay up-to-date on upcoming release deadlines and milestones.

TIP: As seen above, the k8s.dev domain can be substituted for kubernetes.dev for easy short-linking :)