The Kubernetes Project is taking its foot off the accelerator pedal and reducing its release cadence from quarterly to three per year. The move comes on the heels of release adjustments made during a tumultuous 2020 and were touted as showing the platform’s growing maturity.

Stephen Augustus, a project chairperson, noted the move on his Twitter page. The former open source engineer at VMware recently moved to Cisco, where he now servers as head of open source and an engineering director. He had been behind the move since it was first offered up as an option.

Augustus publicly initiated the change last year as part of a Twitter post and later as part of a keynote address at the virtual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 event.

“The KubeCon keynote was essentially to call everyone to request feedback on changing the release cycle,” Augustus said in an interview late last year with SDxCentral. He explained that the idea was to stick with the three-month release cycle for at least the first new release (1.21) of 2021, but then make a change by mid-year to accommodate the proposal set out in his keynote.

“I definitely want to take at least at least a month to gather feedback,” Augustus said at that time. “We’ve got some great feedback already, but we want to make sure that we do something that is sustainable for everyone who’s consuming Kubernetes, which is really the ultimate goal.”

The idea to move to three releases per year received a majority of votes on Twitter. The confirmation of the move also received significant backing.

Joe Beda, who was one of the original developers of the platform while at Google, tweeted that the move was “great to see” and a “sign of Kubernetes becoming boring/mature,” two sentiments that Beda and his fellow Kubernetes originators have repeatedly said the project has been striving for.

Augustus also noted that the change could better support users that are getting their Kubernetes services through a managed agreement with a cloud provider.

“It definitely gets interesting when you start thinking through how cloud providers might be consuming it … and so many people are on managed Kubernetes solutions and they’re multiple versions back,” Augustus said. “So, how do we accommodate those people too.”

The Kubernetes Project early last year for the first time shifted from what had been the quarterly release cadence it had in place since its initial 1.0 release in mid-2015. The change was tied to the initial COVID-19 pandemic and social strife that followed the murder of George Floyd, which impacted the Kubernetes 1.19 release.

“We gave breaks around when we saw the George Floyd protests, and the teams just needed that mental space and time to talk with their families and deal with what was going on, especially in the major cities,” 1.19 release lead Taylor Dolezal explained.

Dolezal added that the release team also provided contributors with time off around the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event last year, as well as time to deal with the ongoing impact from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think it was just a lot to deal with, and I liked that we were able to come together and agree on hey, let’s take a little bit more time in this release and not burn ourselves out. Because being open source, it’s definitely community focused, and it was nice to not push those people too much or stress them out,” Dolezal said.

The 1.19 release dropped about two months after its initial expected release date, with the subsequent 1.20 release coming out around three months later. However, that is likely to be the last one to have a quarterly release, as the project’s latest 1.21 iteration was announced earlier this month.