Summary Bullets:
- The KubeCon conference doubled in size to 12,000, inviting more traditional infrastructure vendors.
- Conference highlights included improved service mesh connectivity, improved developer tools and visibility via ops consoles, and enhanced application lifecycle management (ALM) via security, logging, and application monitoring.
Last month’s KubeCon conference attracted software and cloud computing giants as well as a newer set of infrastructure participants including Cisco, HPE, VMware, and Juniper, which are recognizing new opportunities associated with Kubernetes. For its role in providing container orchestration to app development and deployment processes across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Kubernetes is at the forefront of application modernization directives.
Kubernetes is a technology that is finally bridging the gap between developers and operations teams striving to support modern apps which are distributed and microservices-based, involving multiple workloads running across various on-premises and cloud domains. As such, vendors at the annual KubeCon conference in November unveiled new tools and consoles enabling better collaboration and helping enterprises through the entire process of building containerized apps, from managing Kubernetes clusters to providing fixes and debugging potential problems. Major emphasis was made during KubeCon on new and enhanced OSS technologies in the ongoing efforts to improve Kubernetes, technology which has become the leading driver in enterprises’ transformational projects involving app modernization.
Traditional infrastructure companies have been setting themselves up through technologies such as software-defined networks (SDN) to take advantage of a more digitized and software-based world, driven by demands for more agile, lightweight, and distributed applications. The growing league of technology providers is entering the app modernization space, looking to play a leading role in enterprises’ business transformations built on the cloud and grounded in new application architectures. This latest consolidation phenomenon, whereby platform providers are further standardizing on OpenStack, was particularly evident during KubeCon as newer entrants begin to solidify Kubernetes and DevOps strategies.
KubeCon themes included announcements around integrating service mesh connectivity capabilities and improved developer tools into platform services, as well as enhanced ALM capabilities for enhanced management, security, logging, and application monitoring. Kubernetes’ growing prominence and its emphasis on easing operational provisioning associated with microservices and serverless computing certainly present new opportunities for infrastructure vendors which have always catered to IT teams. As a result, mounting activities among these IaaS circles threaten to disrupt platform services and solutions delivered by IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, SAP, and others.
Over the next 12 months, based on technology shifts across SDN, network service mesh (NSM), Istio, and others, GlobalData predicts that infrastructure providers will significantly increase their visibility alongside more established cloud and software players by offering operations teams maturing portfolios aimed at supporting DevOps models.
For more on Kubernetes’ latest trends and announcements on display during KubeCon, including Istio service mesh, new Kubernetes developer tools, application lifecycle management (ALM) enhancements, and the most recent activities among infrastructure players, please see “KubeCon 2019: Kubernetes Becomes OpenStack Vendors’ DevOps Play.”
IT Connection 