1. Container is the new normal
Containerisation has revolutionised the way in which businesses manage their applications and infrastructures. The wider adoption of containerisation technologies by companies is clearly underway, and they are no longer hesitating to place containers at the heart of their strategy and future developments, enabling them in particular to benefit from increased flexibility in the development and deployment of their products.
The main brakes and obstacles that may have existed, such as the reliability of the technology or the challenges associated with container security, have gradually been removed, enabling companies to widely adopt Kubernetes in their developments.
As a result, new projects are gradually becoming "Kubernetes by design".
2. Kubernetes, the new benchmark platform
The growing popularity of Kubernetes as a container management system has played a key role in the widespread adoption of the technology. Kubernetes provides advanced container orchestration, enabling businesses to easily manage large-scale container clusters, with high availability, automatic scalability and simplified update management. As a result, Kubernetes is becoming the default platform for new business projects.
Whatever the workloads to be deployed, developers are favouring Kubernetes technologies, going so far as to designate it as the benchmark operating system in the Cloud. This simplified analogy highlights the technological potential of Kubernetes and shows the extent to which this platform and its standards have become established thanks, among other things, to the levels of abstraction they provide.
3. Persistent challenges
Even though companies are increasingly adopting technologies derived from Kubernetes, complexity and a lack of talent remain major challenges for companies seeking to implement these types of projects.
The lack of talent and qualified professionals to develop, test and launch projects is a crucial sticking point that was widely discussed at the KubeCon conferences. The various speakers highlighted the fact that this lack led to issues such as delays in project development, configuration errors, sub-optimal performance and even security issues. It is therefore essential for companies to take this point into account when drawing up schedules and launching certain projects.
Fortunately, the trend seems to be moving in the right direction, with the market moving towards the sharing of best practice among professionals, investment in Kubernetes training and certification, and better feedback. What's more, the Kubernetes community is providing more and more suitable tools to improve the handling and deployment of the technology for all projects.
4. A vibrant community
Kubernetes very quickly became the second largest open-source project (after Linux). Growing rapidly over the last few years, the community is dynamic and built around strong values, such as conviviality and diversity. The figures speak for themselves: 156 projects, 200,000 contributors in 188 countries and 12.7 million contributions.
The CNCD is also based around a network in order to maintain strong relations between members of the community and welcome a wide audience. This is based in particular on the KCDs (Kubernetes Community Days): events organised by local communities with logistical support from the CNCF. In 2022, 63 events brought together more than 16,000 participants. The major international events organised in parallel, such as KubeCon, brought together more than 10,000 participants who attended in person in Amsterdam, and 5,000 people who attended the event online. The CNCF teams and the various chapters are coordinating to ensure the growth of this strong ecosystem. They are building a reference framework and providing a wide range of resources.
5. Let's go further together
On 15 June, EBRC, Finologee, EDB and Cloud Native Luxembourg are launching a Kubernetes & Friends Meetup.
The aim of the Meetup is to discuss the outcomes of the KubeCon conferences and forthcoming innovations, as well as encourage discussions on the specific issues facing each company or project, and thus enable everyone in attendance to benefit from the varied feedback of the participants.
The purpose of the Meetup is to enable industry professionals to get together, share their knowledge and discuss the challenges they face in adopting and implementing Kubernetes technologies.
Topics of discussion will include the key benefits of a KaaS (Kubernetes-as-a-Service) mode, best practices for Kubernetes and PostGreSQL, as well as a discussion focusing in particular on GitOps & Flux.