At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Atlanta, Jesse Butler of Amazon EKS compared Kubernetes to Linux's evolution. He highlighted AWS's donations of open source projects Kro and Karpenter to the Kubernetes community. These contributions reflect a shift toward building ecosystem-wide features rather than standalone products.
Jesse Butler, principal project manager for Amazon EKS, spoke at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Atlanta about Kubernetes maturing into a universal standard akin to Linux. "Everybody’s got a commercial Linux distro. That’s what we all run on," Butler said. "I think Kubernetes is now there as well. We’ve gone from building our own bespoke cluster API servers and our own control planes to looking for standards to build at scale for our enterprises."
This universality influences how companies like AWS contribute to open source. In a discussion with TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams, Butler explained AWS's donations of two projects via Kubernetes SIGs: Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator (Kro) and Karpenter.
Kro addresses controller proliferation from custom resource definitions (CRDs). Customers previously managed 20 or 30 custom resources with small teams handling non-business logic code. "Some of our customers, even four or five years ago, had 20 or 30 custom resources," Butler noted. "So you have some small team inside of a much larger organization that has to own just this code, and it isn’t even really business logic." Kro generates CRDs and microcontrollers automatically using YAML's Simple Schema, inferring dependencies, creating a directed acyclic graph, and handling orchestration within Kubernetes.
Karpenter tackles node provisioning for spiky cloud native workloads. "Cloud native workloads in general are spiky, they’re dynamic," Butler said. It provides just-in-time provisioning that scales on demand and optimizes costs. The API allows simplicity, like requesting "just give me a node," or detailed configuration. This design led to its donation to the Kubernetes SIG Autoscaling.
Both projects embody AWS's philosophy: "In the context of Kubernetes and cloud native software, this is a community and we are all the customer," Butler stated. "We can’t very well build something just for our product and say it’s Kubernetes." This approach supports the broader ecosystem over proprietary solutions.