I was on a SIG contributor experience call for the APEC region, like I usually am every time it happens. Attendance was low that day so instead of sticking to the usual agenda, a few of us just started talking about random things related to upstream work. Somewhere in that loose conversation, we landed on a phrase: “vanilla flavour.”

Just to be clear, we were not talking about ice cream. We were talking about “vanilla flavour of Kubernetes.”

I want to be upfront about something before I go further, because it’s the part I found online and it deserves to sit right at the top of this:

“Vanilla Kubernetes” is called “vanilla” because it refers to the standard, unmodified, and pure upstream version of Kubernetes released directly by the community, with no extra features or vendor add-ons added, much like plain vanilla ice cream.

That’s the technical answer and it’s a good one. But this post is about a small detour that we are about to take away from it!

I remembered that this wasn’t the first time I had come across this term. Back when I was going through the Kubernetes documentation or reading some article about it online, I usually would run into a line that went something like "…it will come along with your vanilla flavour of Kubernetes…". At the time, I just skimmed it. I just read past it the way you do with a hundred other lines when you are trying to get through documentation.

I don’t remember the exact topic, but something related to the work “vanilla” was being discussed. This time, I was actually curious. So I asked, “What does the word vanilla mean here?”

I got an honest guess. What I got as an answer was, it’s probably because vanilla Kubernetes comes with just the basic configuration and everything beyond that, the extra features, the customisations, gets layered on top of that base.

It’s a reasonable guess. It even matches the definition I later found.

At that point, I shared a thought that had been forming, half-formed as it was. What I said was something like, “Vanilla shouldn’t mean something that’s very basic.”

Here’s what was going on in my head when I said that. When I think of vanilla, I think of vanilla ice cream. It is something I actually enjoy every single time I have it and it is not something I would consider a fallback for me. It’s not the thing I settle for when nothing else is available. It’s genuinely my safe choice and the one I reach for on purpose, even when I am standing in an ice cream parlour with a dozen flavours competing for my attention. I still choose vanilla. On purpose. Every time.

So for me, vanilla was never something that comes “by default.” If I try to stretch this comparison a little, the way I see it, the ice cream cone is the thing that comes by default. Vanilla is the flavour i.e. the configuration that I actively choose to go with on top of that base. But the vanilla itself, that’s not the plain no-thought-put-into-it option for me.

I am not sure I did full justice to the comparison I was trying to make but I did my best with what I could.

The more we talked about it, the more we landed on the same realisation: a lot of the words and terms we use and the meaning we attach to them, actually depend on where we come from and how much exposure we’ve had to a particular culture or context.

We can think about it this way. If we grew up in an American household, “vanilla” might genuinely carry that undertone of “plain,” “default,” “nothing special.” It’s baked into how the word gets used casually there. But if you grew up in an Indian household, like I did, vanilla was never the boring option (atleast for me!), it was the special one. So for me, and I guess for a lot of people who grew up around the same experiences, vanilla was never shorthand for “basic.” A bigger point is also about how differently two cultures can hear the exact same term, shaped entirely by where they grew up and what that word meant in their own home.

I always appreciate these low-attendance calls. There’s usually/mostly no set agenda but even in something as technical as an open source project, it’s the casual discussions that can often lead to understandings you won’t find in any article or documentation.