SiliconANGLE article by Jason Bloomberg
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship KubeCon/CloudNativeCon conference returned triumphantly to in-person mode this week in Los Angeles – albeit with the obligatory virtual component. But it was the opportunity to return to live human interactions without the Zoom “Brady Bunch” boxes that was unquestionably the highlight of the show.
The numbers in attendance at the Los Angeles Convention Center were markedly lower than previous KubeCons, and the mix was heavily skewed toward vendors. Nevertheless, the general feeling was that we had to get past the first return-to-normal conference in order to move on to upcoming ones in 2022.
In spite of these challenges, KubeCon retains its position as the central gathering point for the cloud-native computing community, reinforcing the CNCF’s leadership as cloud-native computing matures.
Many dimensions of maturity
Maturity, in fact, was the common theme across many keynotes, presentations, and informal conversations – maturity of the software to be sure, but also organizational and process maturity as well.
This community is quite aware that it is actively building mission-critical enterprise infrastructure software. Open source has supported enterprises for decades now, and cloud-native computing is raising the bar for what open source can and should be able to achieve for such organizations.
Even more important than the maturity of the software itself, however, is the organizational maturity on display among CNCF participants and the larger community.
The most noticeable indicator of this maturity is the fact that the CNCF is a largely woman-led organization. I’m not saying women are more mature than men – that would be overly simplistic. Rather, the CNCF’s preponderance of women in both leadership and contributor roles highlights something that is refreshingly absent: “type A” males who dominate conversations and fall into “boys’ club” patterns of behavior.
There is simply no room for such nonsense at KubeCon or among the broader open source community it represents. The conference’s strict conduct policy is one indicator of this organizational maturity – but it is the ability for conference-goers of all genders to leave such issues behind and collaborate on a level, harassment-free playing field that supports the collaborative environment so essential for such complex open source efforts.
