After two days of presentations and dialogue with attendees at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle this week, observers have seen several key themes emerge, but prime among them is the emergence of container orchestration technology Kubernetes as a central point of activity within the “holy trinity” of storage, compute and networking infrastructure.

“De facto standards emerge and become a catalyst point for people to build on top of and around Kubernetes,” said John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, on the third day of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. “It’s not so much that Kubernetes is going to be the be-all and end-all. It’s what it enables.”

Furrier, along with co-hosts Stu Miniman (@stu) and Justin Warren (@jpwarren), discussed recent news around serverless tools, service meshes and the potential for commercialization as open-source projects such as Kubernetes mature.

Knative still needs big cloud players

Among the numerous projects enabled by the container orchestration technology is Knative, a Kubernetes-based platform to build and deploy serverless workloads. Knative was originally launched as a Google Cloud open-source initiative in July, and its primary developers recently announced additional implementations of the technology in cloud-native solutions.

While the latest Knative news shows progress, analysts expressed concern around the lack of interaction between Knative and key cloud provider functions. “All the Amazon Web Services functions and all the Azure functions have nothing to do with Knative,” Miniman pointed out. “Knative has goodness, but the elephant in the room is that AWS and Azure are where all of the serverless really happens.”

Another trend to watch in the Kubernetes community is the growth of service meshes, infrastructure layers designed to let microservices share distributed applications and communicate with each other. The open-source project Istio recently added a network service mesh as part of its role in container management.

Yet for some analysts, the real story is the open-source proxy — Envoy — on which Istio is built. “Envoy seems to be the common ground that people are using,” Warren said. “It looks like Envoy is going to be that under-layer of everything else. People are still trying to figure out how to use this quite complex technology in practice.”

Recent gatherings such as AWS re:Invent at the end of November provide ample evidence for how rapid innovation in cloud technologies are creating monetization opportunities, but the path to commercialization is not necessarily clear yet for developers.

“You now have a new generation of builders and developers coming in,” Furrier said. “This is going to be a very interesting test in the industry to see how current open-source momentum, which is looking really strong right now, can interplay with commercialization.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s weeklong coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon:

Photo: CNCF/KubeCon