The Kubernetes Project is officially all grown up as it has garnered the distinction of being the first project to graduate from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF's) school of hosted projects.

The coronation required the project to meet CNCF's list of criteria for projects to move from incubation to graduation. This includes demonstration of "thriving" adoption; a documented, structured governance process; and a strong commitment to its community. Incubated projects must also adopt the CNCF code of conduct, define their own governance structure, and establish a steering committee.

"It signals that Kubernetes is mature as an open source project and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry, in companies of all sizes," explained CNCF COO Chris Aniszczyk, in a statement.

The Kubernetes Project graduation leaves behind 13 incubating projects and two "inception" projects within CNCF.

Kubernetes was the first pet project taken under the wing of CNCF when it formed in mid-2015. The container orchestration platform was donated by Google to CNCF, having emerged from Google's Borg project.

Kubernetes has rapidly become the open source container orchestrator of choice across the cloud native space. And more recently has garnered traction as an orchestration platform for more diverse settings.

The Kubernetes Project currently sits at No. 9 on Github in terms of overall commitments, and No. 2 for authors/issues, trailing only Linux.

A recent Redmonk survey found 71 percent of the Fortune 100 use containers, and more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Kubernetes as their container orchestration platform. The research firm noted that as of the first quarter of this year, "Kubernetes is arguably the most visible of core infrastructure projects."

"Kubernetes has gone from curiosity to mainstream acceptance, crossing any number of chasms in the process," wrote Redmonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady in a blog post. "The project has been successful enough that even companies and projects that have competing container implementation strategies have been compelled to adopt it."

The Kubernetes Project's most recent release, 1.9, launched at the end of last year. It marked the fourth release in 2017, and kept the project on a pre-planned schedule of a new release every three months. The project is scheduled to release 1.10 by the end of this month.

As part of the 1.9 release, those involved in the project said the goal was to make future releases more "boring" over time.

"This will in no way reflect a community that is slowing down, but one that is accelerating and empowering the hundreds developers that already work on Kubernetes," said Eric Chiang, senior engineer at CoreOS, in a blog post. "This process of cutting up repos and designing extensibility points is the next frontier for Kubernetes as a project because it's essential for users to have the flexibility to build on and extend Kubernetes up the stack."

That need to make Kubernetes "boring" was echoed by Platform9 CEO Sirish Raghuram, who said that would show greater stability in the platform as well as a base for new innovation.

"These developments highlight the increasing commoditization of the base Kubernetes platform and the need for vendors operating in this space to deliver more useful and interesting capabilities on top — such as serverless on Kubernetes and Istio integration — to truly stand out," Raghuram said.

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