Announcing k0rdent: A New Era of Kubernetes-Native Distributed Container Management
Declaratively design and operate developer and workload platforms anywhere, at scale, without lock-in
I am excited to announce that we are releasing k0rdent, the first fully open source Distributed Container Management Environment (DCME). k0rdent is a tool for platform architects and their organizations. Its job is to holistically provision and manage the diverse underlying infrastructure (clouds, bare metal, edge devices) needed to build developer and workload platforms at scale.
The world of cloud-native infrastructure has fundamentally changed. It’s no longer just small parts of enterprise applications that are distributed—every aspect of an application’s architecture is now inherently strewn across multiple locations. In the early days of the cloud computing revolution, distribution was primarily focused on the front end components and API endpoints. Today, it extends across databases, processing pipelines, data storage, and compute resources. This shift is most evident in AI-powered applications, where inference, training, and data processing are fragmented across on-prem, public clouds, managed services, and the edge.
At the same time, security risks are escalating, regulatory demands are tightening, and infrastructure and services complexity is growing exponentially. Platform Engineers are now responsible for orchestrating sprawling, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments—all while ensuring developer agility, cost efficiency, and compliance.
The challenge isn’t just managing infrastructure and services anymore. It’s about providing a unified, scalable, and policy-driven platform that can handle modern distributed workloads—without forcing teams into vendor lock-in or operational bottlenecks.
Why We Built k0rdent
At Mirantis, we saw these challenges intensifying, and we knew there had to be a better way. The problem wasn’t just Kubernetes sprawl—it was the lack of a simple, scalable approach to managing the underlying infrastructure needed for building Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) for distributed infrastructure.
Most organizations struggle with infrastructure bottlenecks when scaling applications, not because their teams lack talent, but because modern workloads evolve faster than the infrastructure that supports them. AI, compliance requirements, and multi-cloud strategies demand agility, but existing solutions either introduce lock-in, require heavy customization, or force teams to compromise on flexibility.
k0rdent changes that.
Key tenets of k0rdent
Kubernetes Maturity. Kubernetes and the broader ecosystem has matured to the point where it is inherently stable. The broad adoption by the industry means that kubernetes runs practically everywhere and is supported on an incredible number of diverse platforms.
Cluster Operations are Complex. In most enterprise organizations the typical Kubernetes deployment model is a large cluster, carved up by namespaces, each assigned to an application team. This approach is an operational nightmare, where issues have an enormous blast radius. Arranging maintenance requires complex negotiations across multiple stakeholders.
The position we are taking is that if we can simplify and standardize Kubernetes deployment and significantly reduce the overhead of cluster operations this will benefit both platform engineering teams and application owners.
Distributed hybrid cloud deployments will become standard. Many early adopters of Kubernetes and cloud technologies went all-in on one cloud or on premises platform. While this seemed quick and efficient at the time, there is an increasing need to be able to consume services and resources from a diverse range of different providers -- many of these beyond the ability of typical hyperscalers or on premises solution vendors to provide. This is especially true when implementing MLops solutions that require access to more diverse resources that are in high demand and that come at a premium (like GPUs).
How k0rdent Works
k0rdent enables organizations to:
Deploy Kubernetes anywhere—on-prem, public clouds, managed services, or the edge—with consistent automation and policy enforcement.
Provision and manage the core services needed to run applications consistently, repeatably and automatically, while ensuring the necessary controls and compliance are taken into account.
Provide self-service, composable infrastructure—allowing platform teams to create flexible, workload-specific IDPs without repeatedly reinventing the wheel.
Scale modern workloads seamlessly, for example AI & ML workloads —with a templated approach covering the needs of MLOps and other workloads, across distributed infrastructure.
Enforce security and compliance at scale—with centralized governance, declarative automation, and open-source transparency.
At its core, k0rdent is Kubernetes-native, leveraging components like the Cluster API to orchestrate infrastructure across any provider while maintaining the openness, flexibility, and control that Platform Engineers need.
k0rdent has been tested with AWS EC2, AWS EKS, Azure Compute, Azure AKS, vSphere, and OpenStack (so far!), and can be easily extended to support other publicly-available and custom providers. It provides a modular, Helm-based templating system that makes it easy to standardize and automate infrastructure and services provisioning—whether for traditional cloud applications or the next wave of AI-driven workloads.
Why Open Source?
Mirantis has always believed in the power of open source to drive innovation. k0rdent is 100% open-source because we believe that the future of platform engineering should be collaborative, composable, and free from vendor constraints. By joining the k0rdent community, organizations gain access to a growing ecosystem of contributors and adopters, ensuring that the project evolves to meet real-world challenges.
What does k0rdent want to achieve?
Promote freedom. Organizations should be able to use the technologies they want—clouds, cloud-based services, all kinds of open source (Kubernetes distros, CNCF landscape components), and proprietary solutions—without suffering lock-in, complexity, or costly technical debt. k0rdent abstracts clouds and infrastructures, making the non-commodity parts of IDPs highly portable while ensuring components remain composable. This means mix-and-match flexibility with guardrails to manage dependencies seamlessly through updates and upgrades.
Enable a single point of control and visibility. k0rdent allows organizations to operate, automate, and visualize the state of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of clusters from the API of a single k0rdent management cluster. Its template-driven architecture simplifies deployment and standardization of security, compliance, and data loss prevention functions across environments, enforcing policies at scale. k0rdent also ships with k0rdent Observability & FinOps, a fully integrated subsystem for monitoring workload and cluster performance, as well as tracking and optimizing costs.
Enable MLOps and prepare for AIOps. As organizations scale AI and ML workloads, they need reliable, repeatable, and scalable environments that minimize operational friction while maintaining high levels of security and performance. k0rdent provides the ideal foundation for delivering and operating MLOps-driven IDPs, allowing teams to efficiently deploy AI pipelines across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments. Looking forward, k0rdent's declarative and policy-driven approach will be instrumental in paving the way for AIOps, where automated observability, anomaly detection, and self-healing capabilities become the norm in Kubernetes-driven infrastructure.
Getting started with k0rdent
Our step-by-step QuickStarts and Administration and Operations Guide outline how to use k0rdent to get started quickly. Or jump over to k0rdent project on GitHub and take a look at the code.
Join the k0rdent Community
Platform Engineers today are being asked to do more than ever before—but they don’t have to do it alone. k0rdent provides the tools, flexibility, and open ecosystem needed to take control of infrastructure in an era of distributed, AI-powered applications.
k0rdent is 100% open source and free – created by an extraordinary international team of developers who have given their all to get us to this stage and would love to collaborate to grow and expand k0rdent.
Please don’t hesitate to check out the k0rdent Community repo on GitHub, join the #k0rdent channel on CNCF Community Slack (start by joining the CNCF Slack and then join the #k0rdent channel). And visit our Community Invitation Form for an invitation to Team k0rdent’s regular Office Hours.
