The Kro Project: Giving Kubernetes Users What They Want
It’s not every day that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all announce they are collaborating on an open source project. In fact, Kro — the Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator, a new cloud-agnostic tool built to simplify Kubernetes custom resource orchestration — may be the very first time ever.
In this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers, AWS Principal Product Manager Jesse Butler and Google Product Manager Nic Slattery spoke with TNS Publisher and Founder Alex Williams about Kro.
This episode was recorded in London at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe.
A Response to Customer Demand
Kro emerged not from corporate strategy but from consistent customer demand.
“I think there are basically two ways that products get made in these big companies,” Slattery said. “First there’s when the company is pushing something, and then there’s customer pull.” The Kro collaboration, he explained, arose because AWS, GCP, and Azure “were all simultaneously experiencing that customer pull.”
Kubernetes’ inherent extensibility revolutionized the systems that organizations can create to build and ship software. The tradeoff, though, is the inherent complexity that comes with this extensibility — meaning that teams spend a lot of time defining their resources and implementing custom controllers to support them. Kro aims to address a common challenge for organizations building platforms on Kubernetes: How to simplify resource orchestration while maintaining cloud flexibility.
“Kubernetes is the new POSIX,” Butler observed. “Things are very different as you go from platform to platform, and customers use Kubernetes to abstract those different things away as an open standard. ‘Please don’t build something proprietary on top of that,’ is what we all heard from customers.”
“There was the multicloud aspect as well,” Slattery added. “People were saying to me, ‘I don’t want something that’s Google specific. I don’t want something that’s Amazon-specific. I want something that is Kubernetes native so that I can run it in any Kubernetes cluster provided by any vendor.’ So I think that customer pull is what actually brought us all together.”
Cross-Cloud Collaboration
What makes Kro particularly interesting is its origin story. Rather than competing with similar tools, teams from Google, AWS, and Microsoft Azure decided to collaborate.
“We found out we were all working on similar things, and I invited some people from Azure and Google over for lunch at AWS,” Butler recalled. “We all had the same mission: How do I use whatever I want, but keep that standard layer? How do I keep it the same on different clouds and in different environments? If I want to run a cluster on a stack of Raspberry Pis in my garage, I want to be able to use this solution, right? So that’s what makes it a really good community project.”
This approach exemplifies what Butler called the “same team, different company” mindset prevalent in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation community — a philosophy that extends beyond corporate boundaries for the benefit of users.
For Slattery, the collaboration has been educational: “It’s been a new experience, for sure. Very rewarding personally, but it’s also kind of changed my perspective on business … Making that kind of business decision to do something as open source versus closed source.”
Simplifying the Developer Experience
Kro addresses a specific challenge: enabling platform teams to present simplified, secure interfaces for developers who need cloud resources without requiring expertise in each service’s configuration details.
“The platform team needs to be able to group these things into some sort of unit that is usable by an end user,” Slattery said. “So the end user can just say, ‘Here’s my name for this Cloud SQL instance, and here’s the region I want to run it in,’ and not have to worry about crypto keys and service accounts.”
Community Momentum
Though only seven months old, Kro has already attracted significant community interest: 57 active contributors without any formal marketing push. So what’s next?
“The next question is, you know, what are the core features that we can enable? Collections is a big one,” Butler said. “People want to use existing resources. You don’t always want to create a new one. You just want to say, ‘Hey, this refers to that one.'”
“Right now Kro is in alpha stage, so don’t run it in production,” Slattery added. “Definitely, one of our big goals is to get it to production-ready.”
Check out the full episode for more of the Kro conversation, including how contributor roles get split up, the challenge of automation tools not based on Kubernetes, and why the Kro project organizers are keeping it “very discreetly scoped.”
