The U-2 Federal Laboratory successfully leveraged Kubernetes during a local training sortie on a U-2 Dragon Lady assigned to the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base, California, on September 22. This represents the first time Kubernetes has flown on an operational major weapon system in the Department of Defense.
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Its container-centric management environment orchestrates computing, networking, and storage on behalf of user workloads and allows for the deployment of complex microservice based applications with complete automation.
Within the Department of Defense, Kubernetes will allow military weapon systems to pool available on-board computing power to meet advanced system and software needs on demand.
The U-2 flight brought together the power of four individual, flight-certified computers on board the aircraft, leveraging the advantages of Kubernetes to run advanced machine learning algorithms without any negative effects on the aircraft’s flight or mission systems.
Air Force leaders have previously stated that future victories in combat will depend on the service fully leveraging leading edge digital technology. Demonstrating the use of Kubernetes while inflight on a major weapon system, like the U-2, aligns with the Digital Air Force initiative and enables Airmen to have access to real-time data when and where they need it.