Kubernetes is one of the most active and long-lived open source projects, supporting critical infrastructure for organisations worldwide. Its decade-long development has involved substantial architectural changes, multiple governance layers, and sustained efforts to manage technical debt without compromising stability. In this study, we examine the evolution of technical debt in Kubernetes by analysing a longitudinal dataset that includes over 311,000 pull requests, 158,000 issues, 1.3 million comments, and mailing list discussions spanning from the project’s inception in 2014 through April 2025. We investigate how developer productivity varies over time, where technical debt is concentrated within the system, which types of debt are addressed, and what signals indicate debt repayment and prioritisation. Our analysis combines temporal trends, file-level metrics, project labels, and textual artefacts from both GitHub and Google Groups. The findings highlight the interplay between organisational coordination and code-level change, and provide practical insight into how large-scale open source systems manage long-term maintenance work.
Sadif Ahmed Bangladesh University of Engineering and Techonology, Md Nafiu Rahman Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Zahin Wahab The University of British Columbia, Gias Uddin York University, Canada, Rifat Shahriyar Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka, Bangladesh
