State of Open: Kubernetes and the UK Report
Released on 1 April 2025
Launched at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London, Europe’s largest KubeCon, with over 13,000 registered attendees, held in the city that hosted Europe’s first KubeCon in 2016, this report tells the story of the UK’s outsized role in Kubernetes and cloud native, from the 2014 Hoxton Hotel meetings that seeded the CNCF to today, when the UK is the fourth biggest contributor to Kubernetes globally, third in CNCF code contribution, and home of the current number one individual contributor.
Report Includes:
Foreword and Conclusion
- Foreword, Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation
- Celebrating the UK Community, Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK
- Conclusion, Dr Jennifer Barth, Research Director, OpenUK and Founder, Symmetry
Early Days
- The Rooms Where It Happened, Alexis Richardson, CEO, ConfigHub (co-founder, Weaveworks; first CNCF TOC chair)
- The Early Days, Jetstack, and Building a Meetup, Matt Barker, VP, Venafi and Founder, Jetstack
- The Docker Story, Justin Cormack, CTO, Docker
- Securing Kubernetes, Andrew Martin, CEO and Co-Founder, ControlPlane
The Evolution
- Platform Engineering and The Platform Maturity Model, Nicki Watt, CTO, OpenCredo / Trifork UK
- Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Cheryl Hung, Senior Director of Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm (CNCF Director of Ecosystem 2018–2020)
- Kubernetes Maintainer, Release Team Subproject Lead, SIG Docs Technical Lead, Kat Cosgrove, Open Source Advocate, Independent
- A Broader Landscape within CNCF, Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer, Isovalent at Cisco
Data and Timeline
- Timeline infographic: 2014 first commit to 2025 report launch
- CNCF data on UK contributions: maintainers, contributors and GitHub activity
Executive Summary
The UK has played an influential role in Kubernetes and the wider cloud native ecosystem from its very inception, often providing the initial spark for new collaborative models, essential tooling and forward-thinking practices.
The UK in Kubernetes’ origin story
- The “big tent” that became the CNCF was sketched on napkins in Shoreditch: Alexis Richardson’s London meetings with CoreOS and Google led to the CNCF’s announcement at KubeCon London 2016, with Richardson its first technology chair
- The first European KubeCon was held in London in 2016; the first two CNCF TOC chairs (Richardson, then Liz Rice) were both UK-based
- Jetstack, born in London in 2015, created cert-manager, now the de facto standard for certificate lifecycle management in Kubernetes, downloaded around 500M times per month per image, donated to the CNCF in 2020 and graduated in 2024
The UK punches above its weight
- The UK is the 4th biggest contributor globally to Kubernetes (up from 5th in 2021) and 3rd largest contributor of open source code to CNCF, accounting for nearly 5.4% of all CNCF GitHub activity in 2024
- The UK hosts the 4th largest populations of both maintainers and contributors to CNCF projects, and stands even higher per capita
- Tim Bannister, based in the UK, was the biggest individual contributor to Kubernetes over the year to March 2025
UK leadership across the ecosystem
- Two UK-based Release Leads have shipped Kubernetes versions: James Laverack (v1.24 “Stargazer”, 2022, which finally removed the dockershim) and Kat Cosgrove (v1.30 “Uwubernetes”, 2024)
- UK security leadership: ControlPlane’s threat modelling for FS-ISAC, the CIS Benchmarks for Kubernetes, and the founding of TAG Security’s EMEA chapter
- UK-donated projects and models: containerd (via Docker’s Cambridge-linked engineers), cert-manager, FluxCD and GitOps (Weaveworks), and Syntasso’s Platform Engineering Maturity Model, donated to the CNCF in 2023
- Cheryl Hung founded Cloud Native London (9,500+ members) and grew the CNCF End User Community 170% in two years
Kubernetes’ second decade
- Kubernetes is now the platform of choice for AI workloads as the industry embarks on its biggest infrastructure buildout in history, and the UK is poised to remain a dynamic, influential force
Press Release and Related Press
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