When it comes to applications, the last few years has been incredibly busy for Kubernetes. Here are a few things to illustrate what's been happening:

1. The Workload APIs (e.g., Deployments) were incepted and have gone all the way to general availability.
2. Helm has gone from an idea, through a version 1, through a merger with deploymented manager to produce a version 2, and is now starting work on version 3.
3. Docker Composer was created and proved to be popular enough a tool was created to migrate from Docker Composer configuration to Kubernetes configuration. That tool is Kompose.
4. The ecosystem is starting to explode with tools from Telepresence to Gitkube to ksonnet to more than I can name here.

With so much that's happened and so much going on, both in the Kubernetes project and in the ecosystem, it's useful to step back and take stock. This is a chance for the community working on tools to make sure we're listening to the people who use them.

To do that we have created the Kubernetes Application Survey. If deal with applications in or for Kubernetes we ask that you take a few minutes and let us know what you think. It will help those working on tools build what comes next.

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Package management, dependency management, configuration management, and who knows how many other forms of management exist when it comes to computing systems. We have managers for managers for operators of applications. The roles and responsibilities of different tools can, at times, get a little blurred. I sometimes find that's the case with Helm. Is it a configuration management tool like Chef or a package manager like apt? This even begs the question, how do configuration managers, like Puppet, and package managers, like yum, relate to each other and what does any of this mean for Helm and Kubernetes?

To understand Helm ends helps to understand where other tools begin and the interfaces they have with Helm or Helm has with them.

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Now that development for Helm version 3 has kicked off, I'm starting to hear a wide variety of opinions on what Helm should do and how it relates to what other platform package managers do. What I'm learning is that not everyone realizes how much functionality is packed into the package managers they're using.

To illustrate the features in package managers, let's take a look at APT). APT is the package manager for Debian and Debian based platforms such as Ubuntu. It's been released since August of 1998 and has been in wide use for a long time.

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Kubernetes development has been moving at breakneck speeds for some time. Along with that, much of the development has been happening in a monorepo. It's normal for the project to merge 150 pull requests a week into the monorepo, with peaks much higher than that.

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Conflict seems to happen in open source communities. As I'm, once again, in an open source community with some conflict going on I wanted to reflect on some excellent lessons I've learned over the years. I've had the opportunity to be in communities during seasons of conflict.

Rather than keeping these reflections to myself, I wanted to share them so that others could reflect and hopefully build on some of these reflections.

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