On June 6, 2014, Joe Beda made the first commit to Kubernetes, and suddenly a movement was born. Kubernetes has changed the world over the last ten years.
“I don’t think any of us expected Kubernetes to turn into what it did.”
Joe Beda
“There was this aha! moment where they saw their workload running, and they connected with it. And that just took like one or two minutes. And we’d come from a world where getting that took hours or days.”
Lachlan Evenson (Principal Program Manager, Microsoft)
“There was a movement around Kubernetes. And it wasn’t just the tech. It was the community around it.”
Bassam Tabbara (CEO/Founder Upbound)
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this replicated in any other space.”
Michelle Dhanani (Founding Member, Fermyon Technologies)
“Kubernetes today is effectively ubiquitous.”
Tim Hockin (Distinguished Software Engineer, Google Cloud)
Happy 10th birthday Kubernetes! Please watch the entire video to celebrate along with us!
How we got here
On March 10, 2016, Kubernetes joined CNCF. Prometheus joined just a few months later.
Kubernetes celebrated its first birthday as part of CNCF.
In the following year, Kubernetes celebrated a second birthday, and Joe Beda explained its inner workings.
By 2018, it’s safe to say Kubernetes had entered the (dragon) mainstream, well, mainstream for Game of Thrones fans at least! And later that year Kubernetes became the first project to graduate from CNCF, followed by Prometheus. And package manager Helm joined the scene.
Over the next several years, Kubernetes adoption continued to gain momentum and by 2020, demand was strong for Kubernetes 101 tutorials. By 2022, 96% of surveyed organizations reported either using or evaluating Kubernetes.
And by 2023, it’s safe to say Kubernetes was part of every conversation whether it was about security, or platform engineering, observability, or storage.
By the numbers
Since joining CNCF, Kubernetes has experienced the power of cloud native collaboration:
- 74, 680+ contributors
- 314, 188+ code commits
- 263, 906+ pull requests
- 3.4 million + contributions
- 7, 812+ contributing companies
Today Kubernetes is one of the largest open source projects with a global community. But again, don’t just take our word for it. Watch the video or find a live event near you – they run through the end of June.