Security News > 2020 > October > K8s on a plane! US Air Force slaps Googly container tech on yet another war machine to 'run advanced ML algorithms'
The US Air Force is deploying Kubernetes containerisation tech aboard some of its spyplanes - as UK-based Britten-Norman teams up to make one of its flagship aircraft semi-autonomous.
The USAF has tested Kubernetes aboard a U-2 Dragon Lady spyplane.
Although the blog post about this is extremely dense, even to eyes used to digesting enterprise tech announcements, it appears that Kubernetes is being used to swap mission software loads on and off the spyplane's four onboard computers.
"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," the USAF said.
Reading between the lines, it seems that the advantage of using Kubernetes in flight is that it allows multiple software packages to be run on the aircraft's mission systems without being dependent upon a single hardware environment - or requiring long and costly recertification of multiple software packages running on that single hardware environment.