Analyst column for SiliconANGLE by Jason English
We can look back on the recent virtual KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2020 event as marking the inflection point of Kubernetes becoming a ubiquitous architectural unit of enterprise computing of the future.
More than 25,000 attended online, and millions more have downloaded hundreds of unique cloud native project binaries and packaged distributions at every stage of development — but impressive headcounts and figures don’t tell the real story.
The flexibility of deploying on the abstracted infrastructure of Kubernetes, or K8s for short, has become a rallying force for contributions to all projects within the cloud native movement, bringing together open-source development contributors, vendors, service providers and users who want to build and deliver more resilient software anywhere.
“Our SRE team used to be more operational and systems focused,” Apple Inc. software engineer Alena Prokharchyk said in a day one keynote. “Now it has an emphasis on engineering, and a much stronger voice in the platform architectural design. Having a stable and solid platform made it easier to focus on the customer’s needs, and innovate faster.”
Abstracted infrastructure was only the beginning
The enthusiasm and sharing going on here in the sessions and Slack channels were palpable, but down the road, we can already see that every engineer may not need to spend so much time muddling with Kubernetes directly. As management tools and managed services get easier to use, cloud native abstraction will continue to move onward, beyond infrastructure, to modernize every aspect of applications.
“Kubernetes mirrors any new platform adoption,” said Bill Staples, chief product officer of New Relic. (*Disclosure below.) “If you were to count the number of workloads running in clusters today, it wouldn’t come close to representing everything in production, but a majority of companies are currently planning to migrate some or all of their applications to Kubernetes.”
Read the whole article at SiliconANGLE here: https://siliconangle.com/2020/11/27/kubecon-2020-hindsight-ultimate-abstraction-cloud-native-community/
©2020 Intellyx, LLC. Jason English is principal analyst and chief marketing officer at Intellyx, an analyst firm that advises enterprises on their digital transformation initiatives, and publishes the weekly Cortex and BrainCandy newsletters and its Cloud-Native Computing poster. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. (*Disclosure: At the time of writing, New Relic is an Intellyx subscriber. None of the other companies mentioned here is a current Intellyx customer.) Photo: CNCF, KubeCon virtual tour screenshot.
