AI
The Gap Between Raw Kubernetes and a Real Distribution
Commercially available Kubernetes distributions ship everything needed to stand up a cluster. Building from upstream source leaves you with almost nothing. Between those two poles sits no community-curated, customizable option. SIG Cloud Provider co-chairs Michael McCune and Bridget Kromhout framed the session around that gap. The question is not whether distributions should exist but what components, defaults, and user experiences a community-built one would include, and who decides.
What a Minimal Distribution Actually Needs
Jesse Butler defined a DRO as bits, tools, and docs aligned to a specific source tag. Everything else is optional. Joel Speed added that at minimum you need CSI, CRI, and a Cloud Controller Manager. Beyond that, opinions diverge fast. Speed used a “full fat Coke versus diet” framing: commercial distributions are the full-fat version, and the community probably needs a lighter variant where users pick exactly what goes in. No single mandatory component list will satisfy every use case.
Conformance as a Floor, Not a Ceiling
Bowei Du pointed out that conformance gives a portable, testable baseline even when cloud-specific components differ per platform. The conformance suite tests only mandatory GA features. RBAC, for example, is optional and untested across distributions. Bridget Kromhout referenced ongoing work on Kubernetes AI conformance as a reason to keep that baseline strong. Letting communities build distributions while ignoring conformance gaps, as one panelist put it, would mean “yolo it into production good luck have fun.”
Digital Sovereignty and Who Controls the Release
European customers ask Microsoft not only whether code runs in Europe but whether maintainers are European. Kromhout pointed to Kubernetes releasing as a model: the release team spans multiple geographies, no single employer, no single country. A community distribution needs the same property. GCP users with strict sovereignty requirements already pull cloud-provider repos as a starting point and replace specific components with their own. Making that assembly easier is the practical goal.
How Red Hat Is Building a Shared CCM Test Interface
The old Kubernetes end-to-end tests called shell scripts that ran gcloud commands to kill instances. Red Hat extracted those tests from upstream into the cloud-provider repo and built a Go interface that enumerates which test categories a CCM implementation supports. Any concrete cloud provider, including OpenStack, can include the core cloud-provider as a dependency and implement the interface to declare which tests apply. When CI spins up a distribution cluster, the test binary queries that interface and skips tests for features the provider did not enable.
Q&A
Does the Gateway API extended feature model offer a precedent for optional conformance profiles? Bowei Du confirmed the match directly, and the panel agreed that if an optional feature is enabled it must pass a must-level test, not a should. ▶ 25:06
Where should the line sit between upstream purity and opinionated distributions, and does a minimal standard kill vendor business models? Panelists said a minimal shared building block reduces duplicated work for vendors and that the conformance layer is a common substrate every managed product already sits on. Customization lives above that floor. ▶ 32:24
Notable Quotes
create something yolo it into production good luck have fun hope it works like we can’t do that Jesse Butler · ▶ 04:06
bits, tools, docs. Everything around that is just icing. Jesse Butler · ▶ 04:45
he spent a weekend uh getting Claude to rewrite Kubernetes in Rust and he came in on the Monday morning and I had a chat with him and he was like it passed conformance. Joel Speed · ▶ 23:41
unless we want rostanetes coming out of claude next week I think we should probably be looking into extending our performance suites. Joel Speed · ▶ 24:06
Key Takeaways
- No community-curated Kubernetes distribution exists yet; only commercial products fill that space.
- A minimal DRO needs bits, tools, and docs pinned to a source tag, plus CSI, CRI, and CCM.
- Conformance tests only mandatory GA features; optional features like RBAC need their own testable profiles.
- Sovereignty requirements drive users to fork cloud-provider repos and replace specific components today.
- Red Hat’s new CCM test interface lets each provider declare which tests apply, enabling per-distribution CI.
About the Speaker(s)
Michael McCune is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, building open source infrastructure for cloud platforms. He co-chairs SIG Cloud Provider and works across autoscaling and cluster infrastructure.
Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Azure, working on upstream open source and co-chairing SIG Cloud Provider.
Bowei Du is a Senior Staff engineer at Google working on GKE. He has been a SIG-NETWORK chair since 2015 and initiated the Gateway API project.
Joel Speed is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat leading the Cluster Infrastructure team. He has built Kubernetes controllers since 2017 and leads the SIG Cloud Provider tech lead group.
Jesse Butler is a Principal Product Manager and Technologist at Amazon EKS. He has been active in the CNCF and open container space since its early days and maintains the Crow sub-project under SIG Cloud Provider.