The Kubernetes community adheres to the following principles:
- Open: Kubernetes is open source. See repository guidelines and CLA, below.
- Welcoming and respectful: See Code of Conduct, below.
- Transparent and accessible: Work and collaboration should be done in public. See SIG governance, below.
- Merit: Ideas and contributions are accepted according to their technical merit and alignment with project objectives, scope, and design principles.
The Kubernetes community abides by the CNCF code of conduct. Here is an excerpt:
As contributors and maintainers of this project, and in the interest of fostering an open and welcoming community, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and other activities.
As a member of the Kubernetes project, you represent the project and your fellow contributors. We value our community tremendously and we'd like to keep cultivating a friendly and collaborative environment for our contributors and users. We want everyone in the community to have positive experiences.
All repositories under Kubernetes github orgs, such as kubernetes and kubernetes-incubator, should follow the procedures outlined in the incubator document. All code projects use the Apache Licence version 2.0. Documentation repositories should use the Creative Commons License version 4.0.
Kubernetes is a large project. It is necessarily a group effort.
There are many ways to participate and contribute. We value all forms of constructive contribution, no matter how small, even if not explicitly described below.
It is intended that contributors have the opportunity to grow in responsibilities, privileges, and authority corresponding to the scope, quality, quantity, and duration of their contributions. Definition of criteria and process is in progress.
Why would someone want to perform and be accepted into a particular role?
- To work more efficiently; more permissions reduce development friction
- Status (have the Kubernetes badge on his/her profile and/or contributions)
- Ownership
- etc...
Roles that are currently assumed by project participants are described below,
with a focus on the kubernetes/kubernetes repo.
Code and documentation contributors:
- New Contributor: a couple of PRs; should be welcomed to the community, helped with PR workflow, and directed to relevant documentation
- Active Contributor: at least 3 merged PRs (which could include documentation contributions as well as code), including one in the past month; we have expectations that frequent contributors will assist in our code-review process and with project maintenance
- Org Member: an active contributor for at least 3 months; active enough to be useful to assign issues to them and add them to a github team (e.g., for a SIG) for notification purposes; trusted enough to run tests on their PRs automatically; can issue "@k8s-bot ok to test" for other contributors; if they choose public membership, they get a badge on their github profile; should subscribe to [email protected]; expected to be familiar with project organization, roles, policies, procedures, etc.; should read the developer guide; must enable two-factor authentication
- Reviewer: org member for at least 3 months; familiar enough with some part of the codebase to be in some
OWNERS file as a reviewer (in repos using the bot),
assigned related PRs, assigned relevant test bugs; responsible for project quality control via
code reviews; expected to be responsive to
review requests as per community expectations;
can champion incubator repos; must be nominated by an approver for that part of the codebase,
with no objections from other approvers; should be added to
kubernetes-reviewers; "read access" to kubernetes repo; get a badge on PR and issue comments - Approver: in some OWNERS file as an approver, which will be needed to get code merged; previously a reviewer for that part of the codebase for at least 3 months; expected to be responsive to review requests as per community expectations; expected to mentor contributors and reviewers; demonstrated sound technical judgement; nominated by an area/component owner, with no objections from other owners
- Area/Component Owner: in top-level OWNERS file for some area/component as an approver; design/proposal approval authority for some area of the project, though escalation is still possible; expected to mentor and guide approvers, reviewers, and other contributors
- kubernetes-maintainers: write access to repo (assign issues/PRs, add/remove labels and milestones, edit issues and PRs, edit wiki, create/delete labels and milestones); technically can lgtm any PR and cause it to be merged by the submit queue; expected to review PRs, fix bugs, maintain and improve health and quality of the project, provide user support, mentor and guide approvers, reviewers, and other contributors; approver for some part of the codebase for at least 3 months; on project for at least 1 year
- Project Approvers: approver in top-level OWNERS file in kubernetes repo; de-facto project decision makers; technically can approve virtually any PRs; can sponsor incubator repos
- API Approver: lead designers of the project, who are familiar with the design, requirements, mechanics, conventions, style, scope, gotchas, etc. of the API; most beta/GA API changes are vetted by the API approvers
- API Reviewer: contributors familiar with design, requirements, mechanics, conventions, style, scope, gotchas, etc. of the API; have written and/or reviewed Kubernetes APIs
SIG roles:
- SIG Participant: active in one or more areas of the project; wide variety of roles are represented
- SIG Lead: SIG organizer
Management roles:
- Team Lead: tech lead or manager of some team at some company working on K8s; can influence priorities of their team members; pragmatically, probably want label/assignment powers
- kubernetes-pm: help to manage and maintain the project in ways other than just writing code (e.g. managing issues); should subscribe to [email protected]
Rotations:
- Build Cop: ensure tests pass, submit queue is working, rollback PRs, manually merge as necessary to fix build; should be members of appropriate repo's admin github team
- User-Support Rotation: answer questions on stackoverflow, googlegroups, slack, twitter, etc. full time while on duty
Release roles:
- The roles of the individuals/team responsible for major, minor, and patch releases is documented here.
Duty-specific github roles:
- kubernetes-admins: direct code write/merge access; for build cops and release managers only.
- K8s Org Owner: can create repos, do ~any github action; the number of owners shouldn't scale with the organization's growth, O(1), and optimally it should be less than 10 people who are very familiar with project workings and distributed across a few time zones and organizations The other repos will have distinct sets of people filling some of the above roles, also.
Other repositories:
Guidelines for roles in other repositories are TBD.
In order to standardize Special Interest Group efforts, create maximum transparency, and route contributors to the appropriate SIG, SIGs should follow the guidelines stated below:
- Meet regularly, at least for 30 minutes every 3 weeks, except November and December
- Keep up-to-date meeting notes, linked from the SIG's page in the community repo
- Announce meeting agenda and minutes after each meeting, on their SIG mailing list
- Record SIG meeting and make it publicly available
- Ensure the SIG's mailing list and slack channel are archived
- Report activity in the weekly community meeting at least once every 6 weeks
- Participate in release planning meetings and retrospectives, and burndown meetings, as needed
- Ensure related work happens in a project-owned github org and repository, with code and tests explicitly owned and supported by the SIG, including issue triage, PR reviews, test-failure response, bug fixes, etc.
- Use the above forums as the primary means of working, communicating, and collaborating, as opposed to private emails and meetings
- Represent the SIG for the PM group:
- identify all features in the current release from the SIG
- track all features (in the repo with all the fields complete)
- attend your SIG meetings
- attend the PM group meetings which occur 3-5 times per release
- identify the annual roadmap
- advise their SIG as needed
All contributors must sign the CNCF CLA, as described here.