Configuration Changes in Kubernetes Configuration Scripts

Abstract

Kubernetes has emerged as the dominant container orchestration platform, widely adopted for managing cloud-native applications. However, its dynamic configuration introduces complexities that can lead to security vulnerabilities, system failures, and operational inefficiencies. Understanding the patterns and implications of these configuration changes is crucial for improving system reliability, maintainability, and security. This thesis presents a large-scale empirical study of 28,675 Kubernetes-related commits to examine the nature of configuration changes. We categorize these changes into eight distinct types: Annotations, Corrective, Dependency Updates, Deployment Infrastructure, Documentation, Maintenance, Security and Compliance, and User Interface. We also analyze patterns in these categories by focusing on their frequency. Our study highlights that dependency updates and deployment infrastructure related changes are among the most frequent modifications, reflecting the critical need for up-to-date configurations, while other categories such as corrective, security and compliance show meaningful patterns in their frequency. Our classification sheds light on the nature of configuration-related changes in Kubernetes based container orchestration by characterizing the evolution of Kubernetes configuration changes by understanding the common trends in Kubernetes configuration. These findings offer a stepping stone for future research and practical tooling around configuration changes and provides actionable insights for Kubernetes practitioners, DevOps engineers.