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KubeVirt 2020 Annual Review
Background
KubeVirt is a virtualization management add-on for Kubernetes. It allows a user to run virtual machines on Kubernetes just like pods. Because KubeVirt is integrating with the Kubernetes API and resource model, the same set of tools can be used to manage and monitor virtual machines.
KubeVirt joined the CNCF as a sandbox project in September 2019 (ref. KubeVirt sandbox submission).
Develoment metrics
Here are a few highligths from the project's devstats page, looking at the 1 year period after sandbox inclusion (Sept 2019 - Sept 2020):
- This year we welcomed 70 new contributors across our repositories.
- The number of active contributors increased to 152, up from 112.
- These active contributors come from 27 different companies, up from 16.
- The activity across repositories shows a clear steady increase.
Maintainers
The KubeVirt project includes several components and there are various repositories in the KubeVirt github org, each with its own set of core mainainers:
- The main kubevirt repository currently has 13 core maintainers, listed in its OWNERS_ALIASES file. At this point, all of them are Red Hat employees.
- Other repositories for components of the KubeVirt project have their own list
of maintainers. Usually these maintainers do not overlap with the ones listed
above. For example, the maintainers for the second and third repositories in
terms of activity as per the dev stats are:
- Hyperconverged Cluster Operator has 8 approvers.
- Containerized Data Importer has 3 approvers.
Other metrics
Besides contributor metrics, the following numbers also highlight how the project has gathered more interest since it joined the CNCF sandbox last year:
- ~2200 github stars, up from 1348 at the time of sandbox inclusion last year.
- Kubernetes Slack channel members:
- The general #virtualization channel now has 700+ members (up from 290 last year).
- A new channel was created this year, focused on development: #kubevirt-dev currently has ~160 members.
- the traffic on the kubevirt.io website approximately doubled in page views and unique visitors.
Adoption
We have seen the increased interest mentioned in the previous section through the various community communication channels, with a growth of breadth and depth of participation from users and contributors.
An informal usage poll was conducted recently through twitter and Slack. Of the ~100 respondents, a majority expressed that they are evaluating KubeVirt at the moment. About 20% mentioned a development or pre-production use case, and around 5% had production workloads.
As highlighted by devstats we have also seen an increase in companies contributing to KubeVirt. Related to this, the project also has a growing number of technology vendors who include KubeVirt technology in their offerings:
Project goals
Performance against last year's goals
Since our inclusion in the CNCF sandbox our focus has been to be a welcoming community while working to add more core features that are to be expected from a virtualization management project.
We believe we have achieved good and consistent results through a regular, predictable cadence of releases (once a month) that brought many new features and improvements.
Current goals
Our priorities for this next year are:
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Define and release version 1.0. Work to scope this milestone release already started.
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Improve the communication with end users.
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Improve the developer experience by making PR contributions easier.
These goals translate to multiple specific work items, including:
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A documentation revamp, working towards a more use case / workflow oriented approach and fully comprehensive documentation. This is one of the requirements for version 1.0.
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CI improvements for an even better development environment
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A KubeVirt event that includes a contributor oriented working space as well as user oriented content.
CNCF membership
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How can the CNCF help you achieve your upcoming goals?
- The CNCF has helped the project significantly this year, through presence in the maintainer tracks in events and webinars as well as infrastructure and support services, and guidance opportunities like the technical writers office hours. We would like all these types of project support to continue.
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Do you think that your project meets the criteria for incubation?
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We believe that the project is in a healthy growing status in both user adoption and contributors. We are working to properly document existing production usage and we expect that the contributor growth will also imply a diverse group of maintainers.
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With the current status and the existing plans we believe that we are on a good track towards incubating stage.
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