title: Kubernetes Community - Top of the Open Source Charts in 2017
date: 2018-04-25
slug: open-source-charts-2017
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2017 was a huge year for Kubernetes, and GitHub’s latest [Octoverse report](https://octoverse.github.com) illustrates just how much attention this project has been getting.
Kubernetes, an [open source platform for running application containers](/docs/concepts/overview/what-is-kubernetes/), provides a consistent interface that enables developers and ops teams to automate the deployment, management, and scaling of a wide variety of applications on just about any infrastructure.
Solving these shared challenges by leveraging a wide community of expertise and industrial experience, as Kubernetes does, helps engineers focus on building their own products at the top of the stack, rather than needlessly duplicating work that now exists as a standard part of the “cloud native” toolkit.
However, achieving these gains via ad-hoc collective organizing is its own unique challenge, one which makes it increasingly difficult to support open source, community-driven efforts through periods of rapid growth.
Read on to find out how the Kubernetes Community has addressed these scaling challenges to reach the top of the charts in GitHub’s 2017 Octoverse report.
Of all the open source repositories on GitHub, none received more issue comments than [kubernetes/kubernetes](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/). [OpenShift](http://openshift.com/), a [CNCF certified distribution of Kubernetes](https://www.cncf.io/announcement/2017/11/13/cloud-native-computing-foundation-launches-certified-kubernetes-program-32-conformant-distributions-platforms/), took second place.
Open discussion with ample time for community feedback and review helps build shared infrastructure and establish new standards for cloud native computing.
Successfully scaling an open source effort’s communications often leads to better coordination and higher-quality feature delivery. The Kubernetes project’s [Special Interest Group (SIG)](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/sig-list.md) structure has helped it become GitHub’s second most reviewed project:
Using SIGs to segment and standardize mechanisms for community participation helps channel more frequent reviews from better-qualified community members.
When managed effectively, active community discussions indicate more than just a highly contentious codebase, or a project with an extensive list of unmet needs.
Scaling a project’s capacity to handle issues and community interactions helps to expand the conversation. Meanwhile, large communities come with more diverse use cases and a larger array of support problems to manage. The Kubernetes [SIG organization structure](https://github.com/kubernetes/community#sigs) helps to address the challenges of complex communication at scale.
SIG meetings provide focused opportunities for users, maintainers, and specialists from various disciplines to collaborate together in support of this community effort. These investments in organizing help create an environment where it’s easier to prioritize architecture discussion and planning over commit velocity; enabling the project to sustain this kind of scale.
SIG 会议为不同学科的用户、维护者和专家提供了重点合作的机会，以共同协作来支持社区的工作。这些在组织上的投资有助于创建一个环境，在这样的环境中，可以更轻松地将架构讨论和规划的优先级排到提交速度前面，并使项目能够维持这种规模。
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## Join the party!
You may already be using solutions that are successfully managed and scaled on Kubernetes. For example, GitHub.com, which hosts Kubernetes’ upstream source code, [now runs on Kubernetes](https://githubengineering.com/kubernetes-at-github/) as well!
Check out the [Kubernetes Contributors’ guide](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contributors/guide/README.md) for more information on how to get started as a contributor.
You can also join the [weekly Kubernetes Community meeting](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/communication#weekly-meeting) and consider [joining a SIG or two](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/sig-list.md#master-sig-list).
