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content/en/blog/2025/sig-apps-spotlight.md

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+---
+layout: blog
+title: "Spotlight on SIG Apps"
+slug: sig-apps-spotlight-2025
+date: 2025-03-05
+author: "Sandipan Panda (Devzero)"
+---
+
+In our ongoing SIG Spotlight series, we dive into the heart of the Kubernetes project by talking to
+the leaders of its various Special Interest Groups (SIGs). This time, we focus on 
+**[SIG Apps](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-apps#apps-special-interest-group)**,
+the group responsible for everything related to developing, deploying, and operating applications on
+Kubernetes. [Sandipan Panda](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandipanpanda)
+([DevZero](https://www.devzero.io/)) had the pleasure of interviewing [Maciej
+Szulik](https://github.com/soltysh) ([Defense Unicorns](https://defenseunicorns.com/)) and [Janet
+Kuo](https://github.com/janetkuo) ([Google](https://about.google/)), the chairs and tech leads of
+SIG Apps. They shared their experiences, challenges, and visions for the future of application
+management within the Kubernetes ecosystem.
+
+## Introductions
+
+**Sandipan: Hello, could you start by telling us a bit about yourself, your role, and your journey
+within the Kubernetes community that led to your current roles in SIG Apps?**
+
+**Maciej**: Hey, my name is Maciej, and I’m one of the leads for SIG-Apps. Aside from this role, you
+can also find me helping
+[SIG-CLI](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-cli#readme) and also being one of
+the Steering Committee members. I’ve been contributing to Kubernetes since late 2014 in various
+areas, including controllers, apiserver, and kubectl.
+
+**Janet**: Certainly! I'm Janet, a Staff Software Engineer at Google, and I've been deeply involved
+with the Kubernetes project since its early days, even before the 1.0 launch in 2015.  It's been an
+amazing journey!
+
+My current role within the Kubernetes community is one of the chairs and tech leads of SIG Apps. My
+journey with SIG Apps started organically. I started with building the ``Deployment`` API and adding
+rolling update functionalities. I naturally gravitated towards SIG Apps and became increasingly
+involved. Over time, I took on more responsibilities, culminating in my current leadership roles.
+
+## About SIG Apps
+
+*All following answers were jointly provided by Maciej and Janet.*
+
+**Sandipan: For those unfamiliar, could you provide an overview of SIG Apps' mission and objectives?
+What key problems does it aim to solve within the Kubernetes ecosystem?**
+
+As described in our
+[charter](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/sig-apps/charter.md#scope), we cover a
+broad area related to developing, deploying, and operating applications on Kubernetes. That, in
+short, means we’re open to each and everyone showing up at our bi-weekly meetings and discussing the
+ups and downs of writing and deploying various applications on Kubernetes.
+
+**Sandipan: What are some of the most significant projects or initiatives currently being undertaken
+by SIG Apps?**
+
+At this point in time, the main factors driving the development of our controllers are the
+challenges coming from running various AI-related workloads. It’s worth giving credit here to two
+working groups we’ve sponsored over the past years:
+
+1. [The batch work group](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/wg-batch), which is
+   looking at running HPC, AI/ML, and data analytics jobs on top of Kubernetes.
+2. [The serving work group](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/wg-serving), which
+   is focusing on hardware-accelerated AI/ML inference.
+
+## Best practices and challenges
+
+**Sandipan: SIG Apps plays a crucial role in developing application management best practices for
+Kubernetes. Can you share some of these best practices and how they help improve application
+lifecycle management?**
+
+1. Implementing health checks and readiness probes ensures that your applications are healthy and
+   ready to serve traffic, leading to improved reliability and uptime. The above, combined with
+   comprehensive logging, monitoring, and tracing solutions, will provide insights into your
+   application's behavior, enabling you to identify and resolve issues quickly.
+
+2. Auto-scale your application based on resource utilization or custom metrics, optimizing resource
+   usage and ensuring your application can handle varying loads.
+
+3. Use ``Deployment`` for stateless applications, ``StatefulSet`` for stateful applications, ``Job``
+   and ``CronJob`` for batch workloads, and ``DaemonSet`` for running a daemon on each node. Use
+   Operators and CRDs to extend the Kubernetes API to automate the deployment, management, and
+   lifecycle of complex applications, making them easier to operate and reducing manual
+   intervention.
+
+**Sandipan: What are some of the common challenges SIG Apps faces, and how do you address them?**
+
+The biggest challenge we’re facing all the time is the need to reject a lot of features, ideas, and
+improvements. This requires a lot of discipline and patience to be able to explain the reasons
+behind those decisions.
+
+
+**Sandipan: How has the evolution of Kubernetes influenced the work of SIG Apps? Are there any
+recent changes or upcoming features in Kubernetes that you find particularly relevant or beneficial
+for SIG Apps?**
+
+The main benefit for both us and the whole community around SIG Apps is the ability to extend
+kubernetes with Custom Resource Definitions and the fact that users can build their own custom
+controllers leveraging the built-in ones to achieve whatever sophisticated use cases they might have
+and we, as the core maintainers, haven’t considered or weren’t able to efficiently resolve inside
+Kubernetes.
+
+## Contributing to SIG Apps
+
+**Sandipan: What opportunities are available for new contributors who want to get involved with SIG
+Apps, and what advice would you give them?**
+
+We get the question, "What good first issue might you recommend we start with?" a lot :-) But
+unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to it. We always tell everyone that the best option to start
+contributing to core controllers is to find one you are willing to spend some time with. Read
+through the code, then try running unit tests and integration tests focusing on that
+controller. Once you grasp the general idea, try breaking it and the tests again to verify your
+breakage. Once you start feeling confident you understand that particular controller, you may want
+to search through open issues affecting that controller and either provide suggestions, explaining
+the problem users have, or maybe attempt your first fix.
+
+Like we said, there are no shortcuts on that road; you need to spend the time with the codebase to
+understand all the edge cases we’ve slowly built up to get to the point where we are. Once you’re
+successful with one controller, you’ll need to repeat that same process with others all over again.
+
+**Sandipan: How does SIG Apps gather feedback from the community, and how is this feedback
+integrated into your work?**
+
+We always encourage everyone to show up and present their problems and solutions during our
+bi-weekly [meetings](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-cli#meetings). As long
+as you’re solving an interesting problem on top of Kubernetes and you can provide valuable feedback
+about any of the core controllers, we’re always happy to hear from everyone.
+
+## Looking ahead
+
+**Sandipan: Looking ahead, what are the key focus areas or upcoming trends in application management
+within Kubernetes that SIG Apps is excited about? How is the SIG adapting to these trends?**
+
+Definitely the current AI hype is the major driving factor; as mentioned above, we have two working
+groups, each covering a different aspect of it.
+
+**Sandipan: What are some of your favorite things about this SIG?**
+
+Without a doubt, the people that participate in our meetings and on
+[Slack](https://kubernetes.slack.com/messages/sig-cli), who tirelessly help triage issues, pull
+requests and invest a lot of their time (very frequently their private time) into making kubernetes
+great!
+
+---
+
+SIG Apps is an essential part of the Kubernetes community, helping to shape how applications are
+deployed and managed at scale. From its work on improving Kubernetes' workload APIs to driving
+innovation in AI/ML application management, SIG Apps is continually adapting to meet the needs of
+modern application developers and operators. Whether you’re a new contributor or an experienced
+developer, there’s always an opportunity to get involved and make an impact.
+
+If you’re interested in learning more or contributing to SIG Apps, be sure to check out their [SIG
+README](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-apps) and join their bi-weekly
+meetings:
+
+- [Mailing List](https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/g/sig-apps)
+- [Slack Channel](https://kubernetes.slack.com/messages/sig-apps)