Linux containers are a transformational technology and the most recent example of open source powering the next wave of enterprise IT innovation; but while the benefits of containers are great, they need a strong supporting cast of complementary technologies and support to fully realize this untapped potential for enterprise customers. One of the critical pieces of this mix is container orchestration and management, which allows many application containers, each containing distinct application services, to be woven together into a more complex, fully-featured enterprise application. Though the concept is simple, the task is not. Luckily, the Kubernetes project provides an effective and, more importantly, standardized way of managing container orchestration at scale.

Based on Google's experience developing internal containerized platforms like Borg, Kubernetes inherits Google's technology and expertise when it comes to orchestrating containers at scale. After all, at Google, “everything runs in a container,” which means that container orchestration is critical to actually providing the cloud services like Search, Gmail and more for which the company is known. Kubernetes, however, goes further in that:

• It's fully open source

• It's backed by many significant IT leaders and hundreds of contributors

• It provides the supported orchestration backbone for Red Hat's container offerings, including OpenShift Enterprise 3 and the forthcoming Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform

• It’s ready for enterprise customers to leverage for their own application services

While Google maintains top contributor status to the Kubernetes project (and rightly so, given their experience), Red Hat is the second leading contributor, recognized as a Google partner of the year for our collaboration in Kubernetes and many other areas. This should be no surprise given our efforts to driver container adoption within the enterprise through the delivery of safe, predictable and secure infrastructure. From Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host to OpenShift Enterprise 3 and the forthcoming Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform, we are well-suited to bring container innovations into the enterprise, leveraging Kubernetes as the common backbone for orchestration.

With this said, we are very pleased to fully welcome Kubernetes 1.0 into the enterprise open source world and are fully committed to our collaboration and work with not only the Kubernetes community, but also with Google as we help the enterprise world realize the promise of Linux containers.