At KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2023 this past week in Chicago, discussion turned from the ubiquity of the software container orchestrator Kubernetes as the heart of cloud-native development to addressing a vast ecosystem of projects and vendors, which in turn are enabling applications and data to become more distributed and independent from any particular underlying cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
With open-source cloud native projects driving more than $4.4 billion in economic impact, according to McKinsey, Priyanka Sharma, chair of the event host Cloud Native Computing Foundation. kicked off the event noting that Kubernetes has likely “realized its Linux moment,” with trillions of downloads and more than 220,000 development contributors involved.
Platform engineering and developer experience were the big stories of KubeCon NA 2022 in my coverage. This year, the real action is focused on the edges of the cloud-native ecosystem: security, portability, data management and specialized forms of observability and measurement.
“KubeCon used to be about how to run Kubernetes, but now it’s everything around it — more of a de facto event for back-end development in general,” said Emre Baran, founder and chief executive of Cerbos.dev. “How do all of these projects help developers build software better and faster without having to think about all the abstract concepts of infrastructure, identity and scale?”
As expected, generative artificial intelligence now enters the cloud-native conversation in a big way, as vendors seek to support massive machine learning data sets and inference models, even if it is early days for showing developer uptake and commercial outcomes.
Developer independence
Every year, we see new takes on infrastructure-as-code automation for configuration, build and deployment. This year, community and vendor innovation focused on compact form factors of Kubernetes such as k3s, k0s, Microshift, and highly portable WebAssembly binaries, which will allow developers to easily create applications that are independent of the concerns of underlying architecture.
A newly announced Red Hat Device Edge offering turns it’s platform into a product to deploy compact Microshift nodes with enough sophistication to support local application logic and even some applied AI cases on the likes of drones, autonomous cars and mobile devices.
In order to ease conflicts within hybrid cloud environments across different vendors and projects, Replicated Inc. now sends a Helm chart along with any packaged application, so end users can deploy even third-party vendor software in a familiar cloud-native form factor. Further, operators can pre-validate a package during installation against the compatibility concerns of their specific deployment environments, such as OpenShift, EKS and GKS.
Acorn Labs Inc. is helping to overcome Kubernetes configuration headaches by offering a WebAssembly-based sandbox service that lets developers run simple Docker-style containers within complex temporary test environments that have publicly shareable endpoints. These ephemeral images can then be reconstituted as Kubernetes-backed environments for production-ready application workloads.
Chkk Inc. offers a configuration and dependency research service…
Read JE’s whole event roundup on SiliconANGLE here: https://siliconangle.com/2023/11/11/kubecon-na-2023-finding-cloud-independence-edges-kubernetes/
Click here to read the Chinese translation of this article.
Photo/composite credit: Jason English.
