Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Community
The pandemic has significantly accelerated the adoption of Kubernetes and cloud native environments as a way to accommodate the surge in remote workers and other infrastructure constraints. Following the beginning of the pandemic, however, organizations are retaining their investments for those organizations with cloud native infrastructure already in place. They have realized that cloud native is well worth maintaining their investments. Meanwhile, Kubernetes adoption continues to remain on an upward curve. And yet, challenges remain, needless to say. In this context, we look at the status of cloud native adoption, and in particular, Kubernetes at this time, compared to a year ago.
In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded on the floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, we discussed these themes along with the state of Kubernetes and the community with James Laverack, staff solutions engineer, Jetstack a member of the Kubernetes release team, and Christoph Blecker, site reliability engineer, Red Hat, a member of the Kubernetes steering committee.
Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Community
Kubernetes largely owes its wide-scale adoption to how it helps to solve scaling challenges, but with that attribute comes complexity. “Kubernetes is designed to be a scalable, resilient platform for container orchestration and it does that really well, but then there’s this entire ecosystem that’s built around it in the cloud data community for other components that are the best at what they do,” Blecker said.
“The entire cloud native landscape springs out of different projects and different components that all lead together… and one of those important challenges to learn is figuring out what components and what puzzle pieces from the cloud native ecosystem are really the pieces that you need to support your business goals,” Blecker explained.
In many ways, Kubernetes’ ultimate success — or even possible failure — depends on the community. It is very valuable, for example, “to try to understand what we can do to grow the community,” Laverack said. “What we can really do is help contributors contribute to Kubernetes and build it into the best project it could possibly be.”
