Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian speaks at Google Cloud Next in April. (Google Photo)
After watching countless companies unlock value from Kubernetes, Google has decided to keep a tighter hand on one of its most promising open-source projects.
Knative, an open-source tool released last year by Google Cloud as a way to build serverless applications on top of Kubernetes, will not enter a vendor-neutral foundation such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Google announced Tuesday. “Google leadership has considered (the calls to donate), and has decided not to donate Knative to any foundation for the foreseeable future,” wrote Google’s Donna Malayeri in an email to Knative developers posted in Google Groups.
“Within the next few weeks, we plan to clarify how project members can attain leadership positions in Knative. As always, our goal is to ensure that Knative serves the needs of our users, the community, and everyone who benefits from using Knative,” Malayeri wrote.
The move was met with disappointment from several members of the enterprise tech open-source community, including Microsoft’s Brendan Burns, one of the creators of Kubernetes who helped develop the container-orchestration project while working for Google.
The CNCF was created with Google’s decision to release Kubernetes as an open-source project back in 2015. Over the last few years, I’ve talked to many developers associated with the project who insist that Kubernetes would not have achieved the leadership position it has in the cloud-native world without the support of a neutral community.
Google was a founding member of the CNCF, of course, and continues to play a major role in the development of Kubernetes, but decisions about the future of the project are made by a committee that draws from a wide spectrum of cloud companies. Foundations get a lot of flak in the open-source world for appearing to make decisions based on sponsorship dollars from major vendors, yet projects without foundations are unquestionably controlled by vendors.
Google also chose this path for Istio, an open-source service mesh that provides some of the underpinning for Knative. Seats on the steering committees for both projects are held by either organizations or companies, not people, and Google controls six of the nine seats on Istio’s steering committee and four of the seven seats on Knative’s steering committee.
In theory, both projects are still open to contributions from community members, which means that individuals and companies outside of Google have a chance to influence the direction of the projects to some extent. However, developers are wary about Google’s intentions.
If Google uses its significant marketing muscle to usher cloud newcomers down the Istio or Knative road map, that could hinder the chances of other — and possibly better — projects gaining adoption. Hypothetically, it could also prevent other cloud vendors from offering their own managed versions of the projects using those trademarks, which all major cloud vendors wound up doing as Kubernetes grew popular.
Two of Google’s most prominent enterprise open-source voices — Sarah Novotny and Melody Meckfessel — left the company this year soon after current CEO Thomas Kurian took over, and there have been a lot of changes at Google Cloud as Kurian puts his stamp on the company. Google is looking for an edge as it tries to make any progress against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in the cloud, and it seems determined to keep control of its promising assets.