Guests: Kat Cosgrove | Billy Thompson
Companies: Minimus |Akamai
Show Name: KubeStruck
Topics: Kubernetes, Open Source, CNCF

When Kubernetes launched in 2014, it entered a crowded field. Docker Swarm was already gaining traction, and the container orchestration space was filling up fast. Yet within a few years, Kubernetes became the second largest open source project in the world, right behind the Linux kernel. What made the difference?

According to Kat Cosgrove, Kubernetes Release Team Subproject Lead and Head of Developer Advocacy at Minimus, the answer isn’t just about Google’s backing or superior technology. It was a perfect confluence of timing, cultural shifts, and ecosystem support that arrived at exactly the right moment in computing history.

The Timing That Changed Everything

Kubernetes succeeded because it landed at a critical inflection point. Docker had just completed its hockey stick growth trajectory, making containers easy to share and causing an explosion in containerized application development. But the ecosystem lacked a robust way to manage those containers at scale.

“This was only a couple short years after Docker’s popularity skyrocketed,” Cosgrove explains. “We had containers before that, but Docker made them easy to share, and that caused an explosion in people developing containerized applications, but we didn’t have a way to manage them very well, and Kubernetes just landed at the right time.”

The timing extended beyond just technical readiness. Kubernetes arrived as businesses were beginning to accept that open source could be profitable. The expensive Red Hat acquisition had started shifting corporate perceptions. “Before the Red Hat sale, people like my dad, who is a software engineer, believed that open source was not something you could make money on,” Cosgrove notes. “But the expensive Red Hat sale kind of started convincing people otherwise. So there was also just the immediate business interest in this is potentially a hot thing I can jump onto and make money off of.”

The timing advantage was so precise that Cosgrove believes a shift of even twelve months would have changed the outcome. “I think if it had been released a year earlier or a year later, it probably would not have landed quite so well.”

The Infrastructure That Accelerated Growth

While timing was crucial, Kubernetes also benefited from immediate institutional support that other projects lacked. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation was established specifically because of Kubernetes, launching just months after the project went open source. This gave Kubernetes access to the resources and credibility of the Linux Foundation from nearly day one.

Google Cloud Platform became the first and longest-lived cloud provider for Kubernetes, giving the project a production-ready platform when competitors were still catching up. “Having nearly right out the gate, the resources of the Linux Foundation via the CNCF, and also nearly right out the gate having the resources of GCP being like the only game in town certainly helped,” Cosgrove explains.

But institutional support only accelerates what’s already working. The real foundation was something deeper.

The Cultural Transformation

Billy Thompson, Senior Global DevOps & Platform Engineering, Office of the CTO at Akamai, traces Kubernetes success to a fundamental shift in developer culture. The transformation began with the DevOps movement, which started breaking down silos between development and operations teams and creating cross-functional communities.

“Back when I was in college, a lot of the developers around these are people that just write code from nine to five, and then they go home and just don’t even want to think anything about it at all,” Thompson recalls. The change came gradually through the DevOps movement, the 12-factor app principles, Docker’s rise, and finally Kubernetes tying it all together.

“Kubernetes comes in right at the best moment to be the connecting tissue for all of it,” Thompson says. “Now we have this whole paradigm of cloud native, and that difference now, where before coding is just this nine to five kind of whatever job for so many people, versus now, the problem is never finding good developers like we are everywhere we grow on trees at this point, and everyone loves it.”

The passion is visible at every level. When Thompson talks to junior developers entering the field, one response comes up consistently: “I’m passionate about this. I love this. I feel at home with this community.”

The Volunteer Reality

What might surprise many observers is that most of this thriving ecosystem still runs on volunteer labor. Despite Kubernetes underpinning much of the world’s digital infrastructure, and despite companies making significant revenue from Kubernetes-based products and services, most maintainers aren’t paid by their employers to work on the project.

“Most of us actually are still doing it in our free time,” Cosgrove reveals. “It’s a relatively small percentage of Kubernetes maintainers are being paid by their employers full time to work on Kubernetes, even like people that are on the steering committee or the technical oversight committee.”

The contributions that do get employer support often come with specific business motivations. Companies may pay developers to work on features that benefit their own products, but ongoing maintenance, review work, and community building typically happen on personal time.

“We’re still working for free, you know, because other people are making money off of the work we’re doing,” Cosgrove says candidly. Her own position in developer advocacy makes it easier to justify Kubernetes work as part of her job, but that’s not the norm.

This volunteer-driven reality highlights both the strength and the fragility of open source sustainability. The passion that drives developers to contribute in their free time is what makes projects like Kubernetes possible. But as these projects become foundational to global infrastructure, questions about long-term sustainability and burnout become increasingly urgent.

What It Means for Cloud Native’s Future

The Kubernetes story isn’t just about one successful open source project. It represents a broader transformation in how software gets built, how developers find community, and how businesses participate in open source ecosystems.

The confluence of factors that made Kubernetes successful—perfect timing, institutional support, cultural transformation, and passionate volunteers—created a template that other cloud native projects have followed. The CNCF landscape now contains hundreds of projects, all building on the foundation that Kubernetes established.

But the success also reveals dependencies that the industry needs to address. As Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem mature, the volunteer labor model that powered early growth faces sustainability challenges. The next chapter of cloud native computing will need to balance the passion and innovation of community-driven development with the reality that critical infrastructure requires consistent, well-supported maintenance.