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Why Community Matters
Tim Hockin
Google Cloud
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● Started in 2013
● Announced in 2014
● 1.0 in 2015
● Probably the largest Go project in the
world
● One of the most active OSS projects in
history
Kubernetes
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Oh, THAT kubernetes...
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SPOILER ALERT!
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This project WOULD NOT have become what it is today without
the community
In fact - it might not have been a success at all
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You may have heard me or other Kubernetes people pontificate
about community before
That’s not going to stop me from doing it again today!
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“Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success."
--Henry Ford
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This was probably the smartest thing Google did for Kubernetes
It was not always easy, but it was worth it
Radical Openness
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Started accumulating contributors
Mostly scratching their own itches
Some were company sponsored
Many just wanted to help, to be part of it
5+ years later - many are still with the project!
The First Months
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Got a bunch of pull requests for ARM support
Why?
Unexpected
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Got a bunch of pull requests for ARM support
Surprise #1: A Kube cluster of Raspberry Pi machines!
Unexpected
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Got a bunch of pull requests for ARM support
Surprise #1: A Kube cluster of Raspberry Pi machines!
Surprise #2: Contributor was 15 years old!
Unexpected
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Got a bunch of pull requests for ARM support
Surprise #1: A Kube cluster of Raspberry Pi machines!
Surprise #2: Contributor was 15 years old!
We eventually made him a maintainer
Unexpected
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#GitLabCommit
Got a bunch of pull requests for ARM support
Surprise #1: A Kube cluster of Raspberry Pi machines!
Surprise #2: Contributor was 15 years old!
We eventually made him a maintainer
Lesson: You NEVER KNOW where your community will come from
Unexpected
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As a developer platform, docs are CRITICAL
Software engineers wrote the first docs...yikes
Do you know how hard it is to write, organize, and curate good
technical docs?
Docs
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HARD
HARD
DOCS
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We all know how important it is
But we don’t always act that way
Our testing SIG keeps us all sane
Testing
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We merge dozens to hundreds of
PRs every day
We cut a release every 3 months
Our release team is community
They have a robust shadowing
program, too!
Release Engineering
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We have teams that runs our:
● GitHub
● Slack
● Website
● DNS
● Bots
Heck, we even have a
community-driven community
management team!!
Infrastructure
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Now imagine Kubernetes without the
community...
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The project would not work.
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The project would not work.
At all.
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It’s not just the people.
It’s the stuff between the people.
And it makes all the difference