Bitnami announced plans to open source its Cabin platform, which is billed as a mobile application for controlling Kubernetes.

Cabin is a mobile dashboard, allowing for the remote management of Kubernetes clusters. Users can scale deployments, execute commands in containers, access logs, manage labels, and integrate with Google Container Engine for cluster provisioning.

The application is available for both Google Android and Apple's iOS, fitting both smartphones and tablets.

The Cabin project has garnered support from Microsoft and IBM, with Bitnami noting a desire by the two cloud giants to contribute support for their Azure Container Service and BlueMix container services.

"We have support today for Google Container Engine and want to move on integrating support for Microsoft and IBM into the platform," said Sebastien Goasguen, senior director for cloud technologies at Bitnami.

Bitnami absorbed the Cabin platform as part of its acquisition of Skippbox earlier this year. Goasguen was founder of Skippbox and came to Bitnami as part of the acquisition.

“Cabin was the one bit of software that we had not yet open sourced,” Goasguen said. “It was part of our business model to develop an enterprise dashboard.”

Kubernetes is currently the most popular container orchestrator being used by enterprises. According to a survey conducted as part of a recent SDxCentral report on container and cloud orchestration, 64 percent of respondents said they were using Kubernetes, 36 percent said they were using Docker Swarm, and 18 percent said they were using Apache Mesos. The survey included the option for multiple answers.

“Based on vendor backing, community, and momentum, it appears Kubernetes is in the lead, but we would reiterate the market continues to use a variety of container management and orchestration software, and we don’t yet see Kubernetes as a de facto standard the way Docker was for containers,” 451 Research noted in a recent report.

Bitnami is a contributor to various open source projects like Helm, which is a Kubernetes package manager; Monocular, which is a search and discovery front-end for Helm Chart repositories; and Ksonnet, which is a configuring application running on Kubernetes.

Bitnami also leads the Kubeless native serverless framework. A serverless architecture is similar to containers, designed to reduce the amount of overhead associated with offering services in the cloud. This includes the ability for a cloud provider to dynamically manage server resources.

Goasguen said the company’s push behind these various projects made it “clear that we needed to open source Cabin to let the community add more functionality and provide a unifying experience to launching applications on Kubernetes.”

Bitnami was founded in 2003 by Daniel Lopez and Erica Brescia, with an initial focus on packaging installers. The company released its first virtual machine image installer in 2007; a cloud images product for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2008; and pushed into containers beginning in 2015.