7 ms·

Google donates money to help run the Kubernetes infrastructure

152 points by coloneltcb 8y ago

willvarfar 8y ago
Anyone got a gdpr;dr for those of us who don't want to click ok on their cookiewall?
- rboyd 8y ago
  Google tired of fronting the bill for k8s dev infra, welcomes CNCF to the neighborhood with $9m housewarming gift to maintain.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - thockingoog 8y ago
    That's hyperbolic. Part of the announcement is a commitment to re-evaluate the numbers as time goes on. Google is in No Way stepping back from this.
    - rboyd 8y ago
      Uh I tried to summarize in the same tone as the article. That’s kind of the point of a tldr. I agree the article was clickbait and it’s obvious Google wouldn’t abandon kubernetes. Thanks for the downvotes though.
- SEJeff 8y ago
  Google is donating $9 million in Google cloud credits to the CNCF (foundation that runs k8s) for the testing and operational bits. This means the CI and unit testing infra that was manually hosted by google will be in the control of the foundation and not strictly google anymore. The $9 million in cloud credits are expected to be used over the next 3 years.
  - flabergasted 8y ago
    Excuse my ignorance, but What??? How does one spend $9 million in Cloud computing by just running CI operations and Unit Testing in 3 years???? $9 million/3 years for Dev Ops Infrastructure for just one specific product sounds out of this world to me.
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      > Between the testing infrastructure and hosting container downloads, the Kubernetes project regularly runs over 150,000 containers on 5,000 virtual machines, so the cost of running these systems quickly adds up. The Kubernetes container registry served almost 130 million downloads since the launch of the project.
    - detaro 8y ago
      From the Google post: > We’re funding this move with a $9 million grant of GCP credits to the CNCF, split over three years, to cover infrastructure costs. In addition to the world-wide network and storage capacity required to serve all those container downloads, a large part of this grant will be dedicated to funding scalability testing, which regularly runs 150,000 containers across 5,000 virtual machines.
    - thockingoog 8y ago
      Run 5000 VMs more or less continuously. Spin up/down hundreds of kube clusters every day - on every GitHub Pull Request. Serve 9-digits worth of container images per month. To name a few. The infra behind k8s is kind of staggering.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      It sounds like the k8s project has behaved as if it has infinite cloud resources at its disposal, and as such has made no effort to conserve usage. If this really is a matter of giving the community a mountain of credits, they could probably make it last a whole lot longer with a quick housekeeping pass.
      - thockingoog 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
boulos 8y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I think the headline confuses the issue. The community wanted more input and ability to control the release and testing process for Kubernetes. It was a fair question to say "Why can only Google cut a release?". We're still happy to fund it, but to make Kubernetes more fully owned by the community and not Google, this was an important step. Edit: Fwiw, I think William's blog post (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-grants-9m-in-credits-for-the-operation-of-the-kubernetes-project https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-gran...) is more informative, since the TechCrunch article just quotes from it.
- andrewstuart2 8y ago
  I think this becomes very evident if you pay attention to the multitude of public Community Meeting (and various other SIG meeting videos). The community has wanted equal standing from the very beginning, and even if Google was stepping down funding, I think it would be an important step in making Kubernetes a fairer community, with no particular company seeming to have more input.
- rockostrich 8y ago
  The headline is definitely confusing. I thought it was implying that Google was no longer going to use Kubernetes at all. The first couple of sentences of the article cleared that up, but the title should've been something like "Google hands off Kubernetes development to open source community."
  - boulos 8y ago
    Even that's not quite right :). "Google opens up the management of Kubernetes testing and releases with the community" (or something).
- crunchlibrarian 8y ago
  Is anyone else kind of skeeved out by how an army of googlers descends on every HN post to defend google and their comments are always immediately upvoted to the top? They certainly are efficient at controlling the conversation.
thockingoog 8y ago
Disclosure: I worked on this grant. TL;DR is that CNCF owns kubernetes, but until now I could not include non-Google people in the administration of (ostensibly) community owned stuff (google.com security policies in GCP). Now I can. Google's involvement and commitment is in no way diminished, this is just a bad headline.
- weberc2 8y ago
  I've not been an avid reader of TechCrunch in the past, but there seems to be a trend of poor, baity headlines (and often story angles) at least among articles that make it to HN. Not sure if they've always been this way, if I'm reading the wrong articles, or if they're another casualty of declining integrity across the industry.
- teddyh 8y ago
  It’s too late now. All existing roles are now filled with Google people, and therefore the project culture has become the Google culture. No non-Google newcomers can individually change that culture.
madeuptempacct 8y ago
So, this is unrelated, but since there are some googlers here - does Google really pay mediocre senior developers $250,000, on average?
- foobaw 8y ago
  Define mediocre. Google's hiring process is great but not perfect. Someone can always slip through the cracks in any company. As for compensation, Google can't differentiate who is worth 250K and who isn't solely based on the hiring process. A "mediocre" engineer getting paid 250K will likely not get promoted within the proper time and could be forced to leave.
- dominotw 8y ago
  yes
caniszczyk 8y ago
FYI this headline is wrong is in now way is Google "stepping back" - this is Google becoming more open/transparent with how they traditionally handled CI/CD for the Kubernetes project. Disclosure: I help run CNCF.io
vfc1 8y ago
When Google gives projects back to the comunity like this it usually also means that they will stop investing so many internal resources on them, and will move on to the next product.
- thockingoog 8y ago
  We gave this project to CNCF years ago, and Google is still pretty heavily invested in Kubernetes. :) This is the end of the last vestige of exclusive control.
grx 8y ago
> Google doesn’t say so outright, but it’s fair to assume that it wanted others to shoulder some of the burdens of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, too. Might be a far fetched, but this might play together with the Commons Clause discussion. Nobody wants to do all the work without being compensated, while others make profits with the work. I hope the transfer of projects to foundations and other open forums continues, and they are backed by industry leaders making the profits. It should even go as far as finally paying solo-developers through some fairly devided pool of funds. Everybody wins when libraries are free, openly developed, production ready _and_ financially backed for LTS.
gdsdfe 8y ago
Yeah the title is misleading, makes it sound like Google is abandoning the project
BenTheElder 8y ago
Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes CI / Infra etc. The tooling, configs, etc are all open source [1] (and largely run on Kubernetes!), but the actual deployments have been Google operated. This is about opening up access to operation of the deployments. I'm not about to stop working on the automation etc. :-) [1] https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra Edit: if anyone is interested in more, we have a post out on the Kubernetes blog today about some of the infrastructure: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/08/29/the-machines-can-do-the-work-a-story-of-kubernetes-testing-ci-and-automating-the-contributor-experience/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/08/29/the-machines-can-do-th...
- pvg 8y ago
  It's really great that Google people are coming forward to clarify it but what's with the scare-disclosurinating? Your affiliation is not a source of potential conflict of interest with some detail of what you have to say. It's the most relevant bit and the reason you can make a knowledgable comment. Say it loud, say it proud, etc...
  - thockingoog 8y ago
    I just want to be transparent. Everyone has an agenda, I don't want to be perceived as "sneaky" (have been accused in the past, even changed my username)
    - pvg 8y ago
      Yeah that is great and you should say it, when it matters. It's just that none of you are journalists who are write regularly and are expected by their audience to be reasonably neutral and who then disclose potential random conflicts in a standardized parenthetical. You can just say 'I work at Google on whatnot and here is what I know/think/etc'. Lighthearted Suggestion: There's no need at all to write like HK-47 or Dwight Schrute.
      - thockingoog 8y ago
dang 8y ago
Since people are complaining about the title, I took a crack at making it less misleading. If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. It's a bit hard for an outsider to read exactly what happened here, or why it matters.
- thockingoog 8y ago
  That's better. I really see this as "Google opens administration of Kubernetes infra, donates $9M in credits to keep it running".
  - thockingoog 8y ago
    We could also just link to Google's blog. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-grants-9m-in-credits-for-the-operation-of-the-kubernetes-project https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-gran...

152 points by coloneltcb 8y ago

willvarfar 8y ago

Anyone got a gdpr;dr for those of us who don't want to click ok on their cookiewall?

rboyd 8y ago
Google tired of fronting the bill for k8s dev infra, welcomes CNCF to the neighborhood with $9m housewarming gift to maintain.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- thockingoog 8y ago
  That's hyperbolic. Part of the announcement is a commitment to re-evaluate the numbers as time goes on. Google is in No Way stepping back from this.
  - rboyd 8y ago
    Uh I tried to summarize in the same tone as the article. That’s kind of the point of a tldr. I agree the article was clickbait and it’s obvious Google wouldn’t abandon kubernetes. Thanks for the downvotes though.
SEJeff 8y ago
Google is donating $9 million in Google cloud credits to the CNCF (foundation that runs k8s) for the testing and operational bits. This means the CI and unit testing infra that was manually hosted by google will be in the control of the foundation and not strictly google anymore. The $9 million in cloud credits are expected to be used over the next 3 years.
- flabergasted 8y ago
  Excuse my ignorance, but What??? How does one spend $9 million in Cloud computing by just running CI operations and Unit Testing in 3 years???? $9 million/3 years for Dev Ops Infrastructure for just one specific product sounds out of this world to me.
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    > Between the testing infrastructure and hosting container downloads, the Kubernetes project regularly runs over 150,000 containers on 5,000 virtual machines, so the cost of running these systems quickly adds up. The Kubernetes container registry served almost 130 million downloads since the launch of the project.
  - detaro 8y ago
    From the Google post: > We’re funding this move with a $9 million grant of GCP credits to the CNCF, split over three years, to cover infrastructure costs. In addition to the world-wide network and storage capacity required to serve all those container downloads, a large part of this grant will be dedicated to funding scalability testing, which regularly runs 150,000 containers across 5,000 virtual machines.
  - thockingoog 8y ago
    Run 5000 VMs more or less continuously. Spin up/down hundreds of kube clusters every day - on every GitHub Pull Request. Serve 9-digits worth of container images per month. To name a few. The infra behind k8s is kind of staggering.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    It sounds like the k8s project has behaved as if it has infinite cloud resources at its disposal, and as such has made no effort to conserve usage. If this really is a matter of giving the community a mountain of credits, they could probably make it last a whole lot longer with a quick housekeeping pass.
    - thockingoog 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

boulos 8y ago

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I think the headline confuses the issue. The community wanted more input and ability to control the release and testing process for Kubernetes. It was a fair question to say "Why can only Google cut a release?". We're still happy to fund it, but to make Kubernetes more fully owned by the community and not Google, this was an important step. Edit: Fwiw, I think William's blog post (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-grants-9m-in-credits-for-the-operation-of-the-kubernetes-project https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-gran...) is more informative, since the TechCrunch article just quotes from it.

andrewstuart2 8y ago
I think this becomes very evident if you pay attention to the multitude of public Community Meeting (and various other SIG meeting videos). The community has wanted equal standing from the very beginning, and even if Google was stepping down funding, I think it would be an important step in making Kubernetes a fairer community, with no particular company seeming to have more input.
rockostrich 8y ago
The headline is definitely confusing. I thought it was implying that Google was no longer going to use Kubernetes at all. The first couple of sentences of the article cleared that up, but the title should've been something like "Google hands off Kubernetes development to open source community."
- boulos 8y ago
  Even that's not quite right :). "Google opens up the management of Kubernetes testing and releases with the community" (or something).
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
Is anyone else kind of skeeved out by how an army of googlers descends on every HN post to defend google and their comments are always immediately upvoted to the top? They certainly are efficient at controlling the conversation.

thockingoog 8y ago

Disclosure: I worked on this grant. TL;DR is that CNCF owns kubernetes, but until now I could not include non-Google people in the administration of (ostensibly) community owned stuff (google.com security policies in GCP). Now I can. Google's involvement and commitment is in no way diminished, this is just a bad headline.

weberc2 8y ago
I've not been an avid reader of TechCrunch in the past, but there seems to be a trend of poor, baity headlines (and often story angles) at least among articles that make it to HN. Not sure if they've always been this way, if I'm reading the wrong articles, or if they're another casualty of declining integrity across the industry.
teddyh 8y ago
It’s too late now. All existing roles are now filled with Google people, and therefore the project culture has become the Google culture. No non-Google newcomers can individually change that culture.

madeuptempacct 8y ago

So, this is unrelated, but since there are some googlers here - does Google really pay mediocre senior developers $250,000, on average?

foobaw 8y ago
Define mediocre. Google's hiring process is great but not perfect. Someone can always slip through the cracks in any company. As for compensation, Google can't differentiate who is worth 250K and who isn't solely based on the hiring process. A "mediocre" engineer getting paid 250K will likely not get promoted within the proper time and could be forced to leave.
dominotw 8y ago
yes

caniszczyk 8y ago

FYI this headline is wrong is in now way is Google "stepping back" - this is Google becoming more open/transparent with how they traditionally handled CI/CD for the Kubernetes project. Disclosure: I help run CNCF.io

vfc1 8y ago

When Google gives projects back to the comunity like this it usually also means that they will stop investing so many internal resources on them, and will move on to the next product.

thockingoog 8y ago
We gave this project to CNCF years ago, and Google is still pretty heavily invested in Kubernetes. :) This is the end of the last vestige of exclusive control.

grx 8y ago

> Google doesn’t say so outright, but it’s fair to assume that it wanted others to shoulder some of the burdens of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, too. Might be a far fetched, but this might play together with the Commons Clause discussion. Nobody wants to do all the work without being compensated, while others make profits with the work. I hope the transfer of projects to foundations and other open forums continues, and they are backed by industry leaders making the profits. It should even go as far as finally paying solo-developers through some fairly devided pool of funds. Everybody wins when libraries are free, openly developed, production ready _and_ financially backed for LTS.

gdsdfe 8y ago

Yeah the title is misleading, makes it sound like Google is abandoning the project

BenTheElder 8y ago

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes CI / Infra etc. The tooling, configs, etc are all open source [1] (and largely run on Kubernetes!), but the actual deployments have been Google operated. This is about opening up access to operation of the deployments. I'm not about to stop working on the automation etc. :-) [1] https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra Edit: if anyone is interested in more, we have a post out on the Kubernetes blog today about some of the infrastructure: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/08/29/the-machines-can-do-the-work-a-story-of-kubernetes-testing-ci-and-automating-the-contributor-experience/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/08/29/the-machines-can-do-th...

pvg 8y ago
It's really great that Google people are coming forward to clarify it but what's with the scare-disclosurinating? Your affiliation is not a source of potential conflict of interest with some detail of what you have to say. It's the most relevant bit and the reason you can make a knowledgable comment. Say it loud, say it proud, etc...
- thockingoog 8y ago
  I just want to be transparent. Everyone has an agenda, I don't want to be perceived as "sneaky" (have been accused in the past, even changed my username)
  - pvg 8y ago
    Yeah that is great and you should say it, when it matters. It's just that none of you are journalists who are write regularly and are expected by their audience to be reasonably neutral and who then disclose potential random conflicts in a standardized parenthetical. You can just say 'I work at Google on whatnot and here is what I know/think/etc'. Lighthearted Suggestion: There's no need at all to write like HK-47 or Dwight Schrute.
    - thockingoog 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Since people are complaining about the title, I took a crack at making it less misleading. If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. It's a bit hard for an outsider to read exactly what happened here, or why it matters.

thockingoog 8y ago
That's better. I really see this as "Google opens administration of Kubernetes infra, donates $9M in credits to keep it running".
- thockingoog 8y ago
  We could also just link to Google's blog. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-grants-9m-in-credits-for-the-operation-of-the-kubernetes-project https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-cloud-gran...