Kubernetes has become commonplace. The poster child for open source has matured to the point where it has become a foundational part of production across the industry spectrum. But when it comes to open source, familiarity is breeding innovation not contempt.

“The ecosystem is doing what you’d expect it to do once one part of it gets stable; the innovation builds on top of it,” said Brian Gracely (pictured), senior director of product strategy in the Red Hat Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat Inc.

Gracely spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in a preview segment for this week’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, scheduled for May 4-7. They discussed the mainstream adoption of Kubernetes and how it is leading to open-source innovation and the advancement of cloud-native computing. (* Disclosure below.)

Every industry has pivoted to software

Software has officially eaten the world, with COVID giving the final push that tipped business operations over the edge into digital. The ripple effect has made information technology the driving force behind business decision-making.

“More and more companies are having to say, ‘Hey, look, I’m not in the pharmaceutical business. I’m not in the automotive business, I’m in software,’” Gracely stated.

The cloud model has similarly matured, and the days of going all-in with one cloud vendor are gone. “We’ve moved past single environments to hybrid and multicloud environments,” Gracely added.

In day two of cloud operations, the critical question becomes maintaining consistency and portability as applications become place agnostic.

“On the developer side, there’s a real trend towards adding stronger consistency, programmability support for more use cases, where it’s becoming more of a data platform as a requirement,” Furrier said.

But while platforms are great on the surface, investing in too many defeats the economies of scale, according to Gracely. Looking for a solution, developers realized they could use Kubernetes to simplify their existing platforms. They started “peeling off” Java workloads, “TensorFlows, the PyTorches … things like [Apache] Couchbase and Kafka … all these things that in the past didn’t necessarily have their own sort of underlying system are now defaulting to Kubernetes,” Gracely said.

Kubernetes has become the hybrid control plane

This meant that the previously small islands of Kubernetes clusters grew to become enormous footprints across the environment in cloud and data center. From container management to platform simplification, Kubernetes became the underlying technology for hybrid cloud. With its ability to manage any workload with any footprint across any location, Kubernetes has become the “hybrid control plane” that enables connection across environments and solves problems, such as cross-cloud networking and cross-cloud provisioning of services.

All this proliferation has energized the open-source community and inspired a wave of contributions and new cloud native projects, boosted by an increase in enterprise end-user input to the community.

“There are ecosystem partners and companies that are working on edge and miniaturization. We’re seeing things like Kubernetes now getting into outer space … we’re seeing Linux get on Mars. But we’re also seeing … awesome people doing database work and streaming and AI and ML on top of Kubernetes,” Gracely concluded.

Here’s the complete interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe. Neither Red Hat nor the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the sponsors for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE