New Kubernetes Ebook! Learn the Latest In Kubernetes Deployments and Trends

The growth of the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem, along with the maturing of microservices as a development architecture model, has led to a deeper knowledge of container orchestration technologies and distributed computing over the past three years.
It’s now better understood that Kubernetes requires an underlying pool of resources for compute, storage and networking, that can be run via on-premises infrastructure or through a cloud service. Still, it’s helpful to explain the underlying core architecture, as well as analyze how the ecosystem around Kubernetes has grown over the past few years.
Today we are releasing our latest ebook, “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem,” with thanks to our sponsors KubeCon+CloudNativeCon (the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), DataStax and Dynatrace. Our goal is to provide a foundation of knowledge about Kubernetes in 2020 and deliver an up-to-date overview of the extended Kubernetes ecosystem. The ebook explores how Kubernetes delivers the capabilities of web-scale computing, its adoption patterns and its role as a universal component of a company’s core infrastructure.
This 80-page ebook, a complete revision of our 2017 version, also explains how Kubernetes is the underlying architecture for enterprise data centers, cloud services and a hybrid approach — as well as at the edge. You’ll learn about:
- Trends in Kubernetes deployments
- The DevOps benefits of Kubernetes
- Kubernetes architecture and key primitives
- Open source and commercial options for adopting Kubernetes
- All of the components of the modern cloud native stack
- And more
We also detail the role of cloud native technologies in container platforms. The ebook’s principal author, Janakiram MSV, argues that the Container as a Service (CaaS) model now defines the cloud native stack. But it’s complex and difficult to manage. The organizations that get it have attained at-scale development and management. They are thriving. But really, almost everyone is still in the early days of their journey.
The Kubernetes community still faces challenges as it moves from its hopeful beginnings, to its ongoing development as a platform that is relevant not just to large enterprise operations, but to mid-sized and small operations, too.

The top challenges facing Kubernetes users.
Culture change is still the gap. Developers need a way to easily package applications and there needs to be a clearer understanding of who configures the services. Another challenge is that policy and security matters are still largely dependent on traditional practices.
There is great promise for Kubernetes, as well as parts of the ecosystem still in their infancy. Data on Kubernetes is still largely a space yet to be defined; if Kubernetes is the undisputed control plane now, questions remain about the data plane. And while service mesh capabilities allow for better traffic management, security and observability, the learning curve is still fairly steep.
But it’s the concepts associated with observability that have us most excited. Monitoring is a practice that largely suited the on-premises, enterprise architecture. It was made to react. But we can’t react anymore. The world requires us to observe what is happening, to see ahead, and to find the answers.