The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Kubernetes product team is focused on two main charters: making AWS a trusted, scalable home for cloud-native workloads and building up the broader Kubernetes community. The guiding principles behind these aspirations are centered on sustainability, according to the AWS team's lead Nathan Taber.

During a KubeCon Europe 2023 keynote, Taber emphasized the cloud hyperscaler's ambitions to keep AWS "a trusted, reliable and secure way to run Kubernetes at scale" and "to engage and support the Kubernetes community."

To many, the beauty of the open source community lies in its lack of corporate and investor governance and the do-it-yourself sense of individual and often volunteer contributors. The Kubernetes project itself has more than 3,000 unique contributors.

But that community model opens up organizations that are under stakeholder scrutiny to significant technological risks. When open source projects built on individuals' shoulders or maintained by a small group are integrated into critical business processes or applications, they need to be reliable in production.

AWS claims to support open source on a long-term scale, "and sustainability is our guiding principle for these investments," Taber said. Truly sustainable open source projects require adequate resources to maintain healthy code and communities, and Taber touted AWS' small investments in bug fixes or code reviews and large investments in financial or organizational open source initiatives.

AWS last year invested $10 million into the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and committed its entire patent portfolio to the Open Innovation Network "to reduce the risk of companies that innovate with open source," he said.

AWS also gave $3 million in cloud credits to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which "directly led" to the launch of the registry.k8s.io project that improves speed, image pulls, bandwidth and storage costs. "It makes the Kubernetes project more sustainable," Taber argued.

Amazon itself is built on open source technologies, and "we have a responsibility to advocate for things that are core to the continued development of technology and the internet," he added.

Based on Taber's conversations with AWS customers using Kubernetes, choice in building a technology stack really does matter. The "incredible amount of choice" Kubernetes provides is a key driver of the project's popularity, but it also predestinates a significant amount of "undifferentiated heavy lifting," he explained.

Given Kubernetes can run "nearly everywhere," integration and underlying infrastructure quality is dependent on finding "the right balance for your company and workloads," he said. To that point, users who spend time planning out their integrations and "assume the right level of responsibility for their use cases" tend to have the most success with cloud modernization, he added.

And while Kubernetes security is incredibly important, it isn't guaranteed. The technology offers the flexibility to build secure environments, but it requires knowledge, planning and constant effort, Taber said.

For example, providers have a huge opportunity to create and improve cloud-native security tools that incorporate emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and global sources of data "to predict, find and remediate security threats," he explained. "We predict that using these tools will become a default" and make Kubernetes simpler to operate and more secure, he added.