Mirantis Donates Two Open Source Projects to CNCF
Mirantis, this week at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 conference, revealed that k0s, a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes, and k0smotron, a cluster management tool, have been donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara said these contributions represent a return to the roots for Mirantis after not making any contributions to the open source community for the past six years. Mirantis, however, has in that time been contributing to more than 50 open source projects.
The overall goal is to encourage the open source community to contribute in furthering the development of k0s and k0smotron, he added.
Mirantis is also especially interested in fostering collaboration with the maintainers of Kairos, an open source project that is focused on simplifying the management of operating systems, noted O’Meara.
Both k0s and k0smotron are foundational elements of an open-source k0rdent project, a distributed container management environment (DCME) that provides a control plane for managing Kubernetes clusters. That framework makes it simpler for a DevOps or platform engineering team to build and deploy, for example, an internal developer platform (IDP) through which the development of cloud-native applications can be centralized.
Mirantis will continue to evaluate which of its open source projects it might contribute to a consortium, but in the case of k0s and k0smotron, it’s clear they are natural extensions of Kubernetes.
Open source tools such as k0smotron are especially crucial at a time when the number of cloud-native applications being deployed on Kubernetes clusters continues to increase. A recent Futurum Research survey finds 61% of respondents report they are using Kubernetes clusters to run some (41%) or most (19%) of their production workloads. The top workloads deployed on Kubernetes are AI/ML/Generative AI (56%) and data-intensive workloads such as analytics, tied at 56% each, closely followed by databases (54%), modernized legacy applications (48%) and microservices-based applications (45%).
While IT platforms for managing Kubernetes environments can be challenging to construct and maintain, it’s important to ensure that IT teams have multiple options, said O’Meara. Having multiple projects makes it possible to extend IT management frameworks as needed rather than have those frameworks defined by the maintainers of Kubernetes itself, he added.
Each IT team today has a slightly different approach to managing Kubernetes clusters, but as the number of these platforms running in production environments continues to increase, many organizations are revisiting their approach. For example, IT teams managing Kubernetes are often at the forefront of adopting platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale. In those environments, DevOps teams are continuing to manage application development, while the management of deployment is managed by a centralized team that has defined a set of platforms for running those applications, noted O’Meara.
There is, of course, no shortage of tools for managing Kubernetes environments. Mirantis is making a case for an open source approach that in addition to helping reduce the total cost of IT, also counts on the open source community to spur innovation.
The tradeoff is that integrating all those open-source tools can be challenging, which is why many IT teams opt for commercial support provided by vendors such as Mirantis. Regardless of the approach to managing Kubernetes, the one certain thing is that managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters is a much bigger challenge than simply provisioning a handful of clusters.
