openSUSE Kubic has become a CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution and has been added to CNCF’s Landscape. Kubic openSUSE Kubic is among the very few community driven distributions of Kubernetes to become CNCF certified.

What’s interesting is that SUSE’s own SUSE CaaSP (SUSE Container as a Service Platform) us not yet CNCF certified.

I broke the stories about both Kubic and CaaSP when those projects were announced. There is an interesting relationship between the two. While CaaSP was created first, Kubic is upstream for CaaSP.

The way things work at SUSE and openSUSE is that most of the code-base is developed in the community projects (openSUSE Tumbleweed is upstream for SUSE Linux Enterprise, for example). Sticking to the same principle, Kubic was created to have a fully community-driven container platform which can be used as the base or upstream for CaaSP.

Kubic also makes it easier for consumers of CaaSP to get involved with the product at the code level, instead of relying on sales and feedback channel. If you want a feature, the GitHub repo is wide open for contribution.

But why would a community-driven project care about CNCF certification which is meant to ensure conformance for commercial Kubernetes vendors to ensure interoperability and standardization?

“I care because Kubernetes is becoming more and more to distributed infrastructure what the Linux kernel is to traditional servers. It’s becoming really ubiquitous, a common API atop which people want to run their containers,” said Richard Brown, chairman of openSUSE, said in an exclusive interview to TFiR.

Brown further explained that there is a lot of diversity in how people install and implement Kubernetes, and that can bring with it many risks – people don’t want to use something that works today but might not tomorrow.

“That’s especially risky when you look at doing something like Kubernetes in openSUSE – we’re a community distro. We want to encourage people to contribute, to shape our k8s distribution however they like. At the same time, we also want to ensure that what we produce works, and can be relied on. While we do a lot of internal testing ourselves, CNCF certification adds another layer of trust to our Kubernetes offering,” Brown said.

The fact is if you are a Kubernetes user, irrespective of whether you are buying from a vendor or building it yourself, you would very much want to use the code-base that’s certified by CNCF.

Let’s see when SUSE manages to get their Kubernetes distribution certified, at least their upstream is certified now.

Open Source is a fun place, especially when you have companies like SUSE with communities like openSUSE.