The Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC) announced founding sponsors and a governance structure to accelerate the emergence and development of techniques for the use of Kubernetes for data, including the appointment of a director. Founding Platinum sponsors include DataStax, EDB, MayaData, and Portworx by Pure Storage.

According to a forthcoming Data on Kubernetes Community survey, 70% of organizations are running stateful workloads on Kubernetes but interoperability and quality of Kubernetes operators remain top challenges. The success that early users of Kubernetes for data have seen combined with an interest in sharing useful patterns and practices has led to the rapid growth of the DoKC, an openly governed community of practitioners who share techniques for the use of Kubernetes for data. The addition of sponsors enables the DoKC to invest in building the community, ecosystem, and tools for practitioners to learn about running data on Kubernetes.

In addition to Platinum sponsors, the Data on Kubernetes Community is supported by Gold sponsors Percona and Red Hat, and Silver sponsors Airbyte, Altinity, anynines, Civo, Cockroach Labs, DigitalOcean, Fullstaq, ionir, Kasten, KubeSphere, observIQ, Okteto, OnGres, Red Kubes, Stark & Wayne, StorageOS, and TerminusDB. Learn more about DoKC sponsors.

"Organizations are standardizing on Kubernetes for container orchestration and are now looking at the potential for making data declarative, just like Kubernetes," said Melissa Logan, new DoKC director. "Achieving this will require a big tent that encompasses the world of data technologies, data infrastructure, and data governance. We are expanding the work of the DoK Community to help usher in a new era of declarative data."

Today, the DoKC hosts more than 4,000 individual members across its Slack and LinkedIn channels, and has held close to 100 meetups ranging from how Adobe operates stateful applications on Kubernetes across multiple data centers and regions to practical questions such as how to deploy production-ready Postgres to Kubernetes. It recently announced the schedule for the second DoK Day at KubeCon North America 2021 including talks from enterprises including 99.co, Flipkart, Macquarie Bank, Sourcegraph, Zalando, and others.

DataStax VP of developer relations Patrick McFadin said, "Including data as a part of deployment completes your cloud native application. DataStax believes in the power of open communities and is excited for a future of data on Kubernetes. It's time to work together and build the next generation of infrastructure."

EDB's vice president of cloud native Gabriele Bartolini said, "We're delighted to join the Data on Kubernetes Community. There's still significant work to be done to elevate PostgreSQL on Kubernetes to enterprise levels of maturity and robustness, and we look forward to contributing our expertise and insights to help achieve this goal."

MayaData's CEO Donald Williams said: "Deploying stateful apps on Kubernetes is a complex process. The mission of MayaData is to simplify Kubernetes storage for enterprises. In the process, we created OpenEBS, the most popular Container Attached Storage open source project. We are proud to be a founding member of the Data on Kubernetes Community and helping users in their stateful journey."

Portworx by Pure Storage's Umair Mufti, director of product management for Portworx Data Services, said, "Portworx by Pure Storage helps the Global 2000 make their data services scalable, available, and secure on Kubernetes. GigaOm Research recently named Portworx as the ‘gold standard' for cloud-native Kubernetes storage for the enterprise. We see a bright future for even more data to be run on Kubernetes and are delighted to join the Data on Kubernetes Community to bring more industry-wide solutions to the forefront."

Register for the second virtual Data on Kubernetes Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America on October 12, 2021 and join the conversation on Slack.