Kubernetes has made a huge impact on how businesses deploy applications and how they adopt cloud. This year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual agenda was very broad, touching almost every aspect of both developer and operations journeys. As Lee Sustar noted in his blog earlier this week, Kubernetes is being used in a variety of ways — for some, this is sprawl; for others, it is an opportunity-laden marketplace.

Kubernetes Is Maturing

The scope of what Kubernetes affects is a signal of the overall shift toward a truly cloud-native way of computing. As enterprises adopt the platform, the way they create and deploy applications is changing to fit a cloud-native computing paradigm. At the same time, enterprises require a class of service for their computing workloads that startups and smaller businesses do not. Many of the announcements this week signaled a maturation of the platform and the recognition that K8s is running enterprise workloads. Kubernetes is not some technology being tinkered on in someone’s basement; development is being done by global corporations that have a stake in a platform that catapults cloud-native computing forward.

The Edge Is Next

Almost every major technology vendor is talking about edge computing, but what edge is and how we get there leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Kubernetes is being adapted for the edge as part of the K3s platform, with a number of sessions and announcements related to progress in that space. The Eclipse Foundation released its EdgeOps whitepaper to help define the challenges in computing at the edge. Expect major Kubernetes management platforms to begin building core to edge management layers in the next year as they compete to become the platform of choice for container workloads.

Below, you can see a quick view into what Forrester analysts found interesting at KubeCon, from significant announcements to key K8s themes we’re tracking. Please feel free to reach out to us via inquiry to learn more.

Storage And Resiliency

  • Resiliency continues to shift left: Conference sessions demonstrated K8s providing easy ways to build application resiliency and DR concepts into DevOps pre-prod planning
  • Integrating Operations Skills: Conference sessions displayed the value of bringing ops skills into product teams by showing how understanding traditional storage and infrastructure administration can extend into preventing cyberattacks.
  • Wanclouds: Announced DRaaS for multicluster Kubernetes
  • StorageOS: Improved its feature set, including the ability to reduce the eviction timeout penalty for failed pods
  • YugabyteDB: Provides scaled out ACID-compliant transactional databases to bring a new model for resiliency at the database layer with additional HA support for its platform console in its new version

Security

  • Accurics: Announced integration with the Argo project for its open source Terrascan to enforce CNCF’s Open Policy Agent policies across the software development lifecycle, which enhances cloud security as developers adopt a GitOps approach
  • Red Hat: Introduced StackRox community, an open source project that protects Kubernetes environments across the application lifecycle
  • Sysdig: Launched a runtime security detection and response solution, based on the Falco project, for AWS Fargate
  • Nirmata: Launched Kubernetes Policy Manager for Kyverno to streamline the adoption of the K8s native policy management engine across multiple clusters

Kubernetes On The Edge

  • Civo: Announced a production-ready K3s platform
  • OpenNebula: Introduced the K3s Virtual Appliance to deploy multinode K3s clusters at the edge with one server and multiple worker agents
  • KubeEdge: The system is used by Huawei to manage 100,000 edge nodes and more than 500,000 edge applications to process more than 300 million data records for the Electronic Toll Collection system in China.
  • Eclipse: The open source software foundation released a whitepaper that summarizes the challenges in the space.

Monitoring And Visibility

  • Prometheus: The metric monitoring project announced the Prometheus Conformance Project to help projects and vendors determine whether they comply with Prometheus specs.
  • Dynatrace: Announced that it is enhancing analytics for OpenTelemetry
  • LeanIX: Insurance firm NÜRNBERGER Versicherung deployed the LeanIX Microservice Intelligence solution, automatically recording both the CI/CD pipeline and a Kubernetes cluster and displaying them in Microservice Intelligence.
  • Trilio: Announced visibility and insights into Velero-based backups via TrilioVault for Kubernetes (TVK) v2.1
  • Tigera: Calico Enterprise 3.5 delivers full-stack observability across the entire Kubernetes stack, starting from the application layer to the networking layer.
  • CAST AI: Introduced EKS Optimizer for cloud optimization by monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing Kubernetes environments on AWS
  • Zebrium: Announced plain language root cause summaries based on the GPT-3 language model

Cloud-Native Application Lifecycle Management

  • StormForge: Announced automatic generation of optimization experiments with guides for setup
  • Red Hat/IBM: Launched the Konveyor project, which incorporates tools to migrate apps between Kubenetes clusters as well as to migrate both VMs and non-K8s orchestrators to Kubernetes
  • Red Hat: Announced general availability of OpenShift GitOps, an Argo CD-based platform to enable workflows for cluster configuration and application delivery

Big Data And ML/AI

  • DataStax: K8ssandra customized integration available on GKE, EKS, and AKS
  • Arrikto: Enterprise Kubeflow is now available for Azure for MLOps, along with AWS and GCP.

Infrastructure Automation And Management

Community Governance

  • Cloud Native Glossary Project: Initiated by the CNCF to help every community participant stay on the same page