If you wanted to see if Kubernetes has made the leap from a science project in Enterprise labs or small line of business project to full blown platform for the Enterprise innovation, numbers from KubeCon tell the story you want to hear. Over 8000 attendees gathered (1300 waitlisted), 100% jump from last year, to discuss use case and best practices and learn new innovation around Kubernetes. Kubernetes.io sessions have increased over a 100% over last year and recent survey highlighting Kubernetes adoption scaling at 200%. 

Now, that we had moment to reflect on the event, here are our thoughts from the event:

• Kubernetes has crossed the chasm: Janet Kuo, co-chair, KubeCon, summed up current state of Kubernetes with “Kubernetes has become boring”. If there was a word to describe a technology ready for industry wide adoption, this is it! This was clear from our conversation with customers, who were universally trying to solve Kubernetes adoption and scaling challenges. A common theme was – We built it. Kubernetes works. But now how do we scale this across Enterprise? In our discussion, a typical Enterprise today had 3-5 clusters, maybe few of those in production, and they are now thinking about scaling them to 10 to as many as 50 clusters. Customers highlighted key challenges with managing clusters at scale (multi-cluster), marrying Kubernetes with their multi-cloud strategy, Kubernetes integration, application and cluster life-cycle management and keeping up with new projects within and around Kubernetes stack.

 

•  Multi-cloud and Application Portability is here: Almost every Enterprise was looking to extend their clusters from one cloud or on-premises to other clouds and on-prem infrastructure. Having spent few years with cloud adoption, customers clearly envisioned their Kubernetes deployments across bare-metal, private cloud and public cloud. And they are looking for solutions that help them manage their Kubernetes stack across those clouds, and both managed and un-managed clusters. Attendees at our booth loved Nirmata’s single click application and data portability features across clusters in any cloud and called out features like that key to cluster and application life-cycle management.
• Key Adoption Challenges – Complexity, Integrations & Lifecycle Management: Customers highlighted complexity and cluster and application lifecycle management as key challenge to scaling adoption Kubernetes within their Enterprise. While many Enterprises are challenged with finding the cloud native talent, even the ones with the expertise, realize that they don’t want to use that talent on lifecycle management. They need automation and tools. Recent security vulnerability was on top of their minds as many of them spent days upgrading their cluster just a week before Kubecon. Customers loved Nirmata’s features like single click cluster upgrade and ability to do that across clusters with single pane of glass. Other challenge with scaling was to remove the complexity of managing the Kubernetes stack as Enterprise architects are looking to hand over the cluster management to IT Ops and provide developers a self-service environment that does not require them to possess deep knowledge around Kubernetes. Visibility across clusters, Security, CIS and other industry standard compliance, multi-cluster governance are key areas of focus as part of Enterprise adoption.
• Knative is gaining momentum: In our discussions with attendees at our booth, Knative and Istio got highlighted as top projects that they kept their eye on. Google just announced as easy deployment options of Knative framework and we expect many customers and will take this technology for a test drive in the coming year. These technologies are still very much in their infancy but promise to help customers scale their Kubernetes and container strategy.

On a side note, Nirmata swag scored sweet points in popularity. The best compliment we received was on our way out of Seattle. TSA agent at SEATAC security checkpoint mentioned he saw many wearing Nirmata T-shirts coming through!

Bottom-line

“In 2019, we will need a bigger venue.” Growing at 100%, Kubernetes juggernaut is looking like it has just started. It is rare to hear that from both users and technology companies alike, and it is true this year for Kubernetes. All indications are that we will blow past the numbers and growth we have seen this year. With strongest community support and a stable stack which has seen production time at scale, Kubernetes promises to become biggest open source project to be adopted across the industry.

Are you ready?!