The Kro Project: Giving Kubernetes Users What They Want
In a rare show of collaboration, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have joined forces on Kro — the Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator — an open source, cloud-agnostic tool designed to simplify custom resource orchestration in Kubernetes. Announced during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, Kro was born from strong customer demand for a Kubernetes-native solution that works across cloud providers without vendor lock-in. Nic Slattery, Product Manager at Google and Jesse Butler, Principal Product Manager, AWS shared with The New Stack that unlike many enterprise products, Kro didn’t stem from top-down strategy but from consistent customer "pull" experienced by all three companies. It aims to reduce complexity by allowing platform teams to offer simplified interfaces to developers, enabling resource requests without needing deep service-specific knowledge. Kro also represents a unique cross-company collaboration, driven by a shared mission and open source values. Though still in its alpha stage, the project has already attracted 57 contributors in just seven months. The team is now focused on refining core features and preparing for a production-ready release — all while maintaining a narrowly scoped, community-first approach.
Learn more from The New Stack about KRO:
One Mighty kro; One Giant Leap for Kubernetes Resource Orchestration
Kubernetes Gets a New Resource Orchestrator in the Form of Kro
Orchestrate Cloud Native Workloads With Kro and Kubernetes
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Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator (KRO), with Jesse Butler and Nic Slattery
Today we welcome Jesse Butler and Nic Slattery to talk about the Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator, or KRO. Jesse works as a principal product manager at AWS and Nic is a Product Manager at Google. The Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator is a new cloud agnostic tool meant to simplify Kubernetes resources for devs and platform admins.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
- web: kubernetespodcast.com
- mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
- twitter: @kubernetespod
- bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com
News of the week Kubernetes JobSets: An open-source API for managing distributed jobs as a single unit. Integrates with Kueue for better resource utilization.
Kubernetes Blog: Introducing JobSet
Kueue Project
Google Cloud Next '24: Happening in Las Vegas, April 9-11. The Kubernetes Podcast team will be there!
Google Cloud Next
Kagent: A new open-source AI agent framework built on Microsoft's Autogen, designed for automating operations and troubleshooting in Kubernetes.
kagent.dev
Links from the interview Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator (KRO)
KRO Announcement Blogs
Google Cloud Blog- Simplify the developer experience on Kubernetes with KRO
AWS Open Source Blog - Introducing kro: Kube Resource Orchestrator
AWS Open Source Blog - Kube Resource Orchestrator, From Experiment to Community Project
Reddit thread - anyone tried kro for kubernetes resource management yet?
The New Stack: Kubernetes Gets a New Resource Orchestrator in the Form of Kro
InfoQ: Cloud Giants Collaborate on New Kubernetes Resource Management Tool
CRD (Custom Resource Definition): Kubernetes CRDs - A mechanism within Kubernetes to extend the API.
Knative: Knative.dev - A Kubernetes-based platform for building serverless applications.
Terraform: Terraform.io - Infrastructure as code software.
Helm: Helm.sh - A package manager for Kubernetes.
KPT (Kubernetes Package Tool): KPT - A tool for packaging and managing Kubernetes configurations.
Crossplane: cncf.io/projects/crossplane - An open-source project for managing cloud resources through Kubernetes.
Common Expression Language (CEL): cel.dev - A powerful expression language.
kubebuilder: kubebuilder on GitHub - A framework to build Kubernetes controllers, details available in Kubernetes documentation.
