Introducing Certified Kubernetes (and Google Kubernetes Engine!)
William Denniss
Group Product Manager, Google Kubernetes Engine
When Google launched Kubernetes three years ago, we knew based on our 10 years of experience with Borg how useful it would be to developers. But even we couldn’t have predicted just how successful it would become. Kubernetes is one of the world’s highest velocity open source projects, supported by a diverse community of contributors. It was designed at its heart to run anywhere, and dozens of vendors have created their own Kubernetes offerings.
It's critical to Kubernetes users that their applications run reliably across different Kubernetes environments, and that they can access the new features in a timely manner. To ensure a consistent developer experience across different Kubernetes offerings, we’ve been working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Kubernetes community to create the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program. The Certified Kubernetes program officially launched today, and our Kubernetes service is among the first to be certified.
Choosing a Certified Kubernetes platform like ours and those from our partners brings both benefits and peace of mind, especially for organizations with hybrid deployments. With the greater compatibility of Certified Kubernetes, you get:
- Smooth migrations between on-premises and cloud environments, and a greater ability to split a single workload across multiple environments
- Consistent upgrades
- Access to community software and support resources
Putting the K in GKE
One of the benefits of participating in the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program is being able to use the name “Kubernetes” in your product. With that, we’re taking this opportunity to rename Container Engine to Kubernetes Engine. From the beginning, Container Engine’s acronym has been GKE in a nod to Kubernetes. Now, as a Certified Kubernetes offering, we can officially put the K in GKE.While the Kubernetes Engine name is new, everything else about the service is unchanged—it’s still the same great managed environment for deploying containerized applications that you trust to run your production environments. To learn more about Kubernetes Engine, visit the product page, or the documentation for a wealth of quickstarts, tutorials and how-tos. And as always, if you’re just getting started with containers and Google Cloud Platform, be sure to sign up for a free trial.
