Documentation in the Spotlight: How SIG Docs Drives Kubernetes Forward

Introduction

The official documentation is the central resource for any open-source project. For Kubernetes, this is a continuously growing Special Interest Group (SIG) where dedicated members work to make information easily accessible for new contributors and users. SIG Docs publishes the official documentation on kubernetes.io, which includes, among other things, documentation of core APIs, architectural details, and CLI tools that are released with Kubernetes versions.

To learn more about the work of SIG Docs and their future plans to shape the community, I summarized my conversations with the co-chairs Divya Mohan (DM), Rey Lejano (RL), and Natali Vlatko (NV). They explained the goals of the SIG and how other contributors can help.

Conversation Summary

Could you tell us a bit about what SIG Docs does?

SIG Docs is the Special Interest Group for the documentation of the Kubernetes project on kubernetes.io. It creates reference guides for the Kubernetes API, kubeadm, and kubectl and maintains the infrastructure and analytics of the official website. Their scope also includes publishing documentation, translating content, improving and adding new features to existing documentation, pushing and reviewing content for the official Kubernetes blog, and collaborating with the release team to review documentation and blogs for each cycle.

There are 2 subprojects under Docs: Blogs and Localization. How has the community benefited from them, and are there any interesting contributions from these teams that you would like to highlight?

Blogs: This subproject highlights new or completed Kubernetes enhancements, community reports, SIG updates, or relevant news for the Kubernetes community, such as leadership articles, tutorials, and project updates like the removal of Dockershim and the upcoming deprecation of PodSecurityPolicy in version 1.25. Tim Bannister, one of the technical leads of SIG Docs, does great work and is a driving force in integrating contributions into documentation and blogs.

Localization: This subproject has enabled the Kubernetes community to achieve greater inclusivity and diversity among users and contributors. It has also helped attract more contributors, especially students, and this has happened over the past few years. A notable example of upcoming localizations is Hindi and Bengali. The efforts for Hindi localization are currently led by students in India.

Additionally, there are two more subprojects: reference-docs and the website, which is created with Hugo and represents a major area of responsibility.

Source: Kubernetes Blog