Article for SiliconANGLE by Jason Bloomberg
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 event in London was the biggest KubeCon ever, exceeding the largest U.S.-based shows for the first time.
The excitement over all things cloud native in Europe, however, extended beyond the technology to the geopolitical landscape and how it’s affecting the European software industry – open source in particular.
Global politics drives the conversation
The political turmoil in the United States was an undercurrent in many conversations at the conference.
Though European software vendors continue to see the U.S. as a primary market, many software executives reported rumblings from their American customers about moving their cloud-based infrastructure to Europe to mitigate the new risk landscape of doing business in the U.S.
This surprising new trend is driving attention to various European efforts to support the software industry across the continent.
For example, the Linux Foundation, the parent of the CNCF, recently announced the NeoNephos Foundation, an initiative focused on facilitating collaboration and innovation around digital sovereignty and cloud-native technologies across Europe.
NeoNephos is an indicator of a broader European movement, representing the most significant open-source outcome from the European Commission Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEI) Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (CIS).
The European Union is also taking initiative to update its digital taxation policies in ways that will directly affect U.S.-based enterprises doing business in Europe. These broader initiatives across Europe all position the European software industry to assume a global leadership role now that the U.S. has dropped the economic ball.
Innovation continues unabated
Enterprise adoption of cloud native technologies is at an all-time high, and the innovation on display at KubeCon continues to drive business value across the globe.
European software vendors as well as American vendors doing business in Europe found the audience at KubeCon receptive to their offerings, encouraging further innovation.
Of the vendors I spoke with at the conference, nine stood out for their value-focused innovation despite the economic and political turbulence of the times. Here are my picks.
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