As key leaders from the enterprise tech community gather in Valencia, Spain, for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe May 16-20, the focus will be on both the promise and challenges for Kubernetes. Two data points for the popular container orchestration tool capture what lies in store.

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, interest in Kubernetes has reached its highest level ever, with 96% of responding organizations using or evaluating the technology. At the same time, a 2021 CNCF and FinOps Foundation survey found that 68% of users reported rising costs for Kubernetes.

How organizations will manage a technology that has become essential for enterprise computing will be just one of the items on the agenda for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2022. Join theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, May 18-20 for in-depth event analysis and breaking news, as our analysts talk with company executives and open-source experts during the event. (* Disclosure below.)

Mainstream adoption drives interest

A key development surrounding the gathering in Spain is that Kubernetes has gone mainstream. Containers have been a part of the cloud-native ecosystem for a long time, but the technology has now become an essential part of hybrid IT operations as well. This has been driven by the realities of a post-pandemic world in which survival has been the operational word.

“The economics of the new model are so compelling that the decision to not move forward with containers and microservices is akin to the decision to go out of business,” said Janae Stow Lee, consultant with Evaluator Group, in a recent interview.

The agenda at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2022 will offer an opportunity to hear how technologies for simplifying, automating and securing container tools are being deployed by a wide range of enterprise tech companies.

The path forward for Kubernetes will require making the technology more accessible to a wider audience, as the technology is not the simplest to deploy.

“It’s still not as easy as you would like,” Stu Miniman, director of market insights, Cloud Platforms at Red Hat Inc., said in a pre-event interview with theCUBE. “Almost no company that I talk to, if you’re talking about big enterprises, has Kubernetes enterprisewide and 100% of their applications running on it.”

There are a number of initiatives in the works that offer ways to lower the threshold of expertise necessary to deploy container orchestration. In February, Pure Storage Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. announced a three-year strategic investment designed to simplify Kubernetes deployments. More recently, VMware Inc. updated its Tanzu Application Platform to simplify the management of application workloads across Kubernetes clusters.

Other businesses, such as CloudNatix Inc., have built platforms on top of Kubernetes to work across all of the major cloud providers without vendor lock-in. D2iQ Inc. has built a Kubernetes platform to provide enterprises with greater control and visibility in container deployments.

Automated deployment

One of the key strategies behind simplifying Kubernetes is to rely more fully on automation. A trend worth watching during the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event will be how cloud providers and others in the ecosystem are injecting automation tools into the Kubernetes management process.

Red Hat has been especially active in this area. The company added new automation features to Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes last year and strengthened its offerings further with updates for Red Hat Ansible this month.

Of note is that the two Google developers responsible for inventing Kubernetes, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, left the company and founded an automation startup called Heptio Inc., which was acquired by VMware in 2018. The pair have since been focused on working within the Kubernetes community to create interfaces that will allow others to build on top of the platform.

There is also Project Nephio, a Kubernetes-based open-source effort led by Google Cloud and the Linux Foundation. The initiative’s focus is to deliver carrier-grade network automation in edge deployments using Kubernetes. Projects such as Nephio highlight growing interest within the enterprise community in leveraging container technology for the coming wave of edge computing.

“We talk about multi-cluster management; what if I have thousands or tens of thousands of devices out at the edge?” Miniman asked. “I need to be able to do things from an automated standpoint, and that’s where containers and Kubernetes really can shine.”

Focus on container protection

Security continues to be a prime topic of discussion within the open-source and Kubernetes communities. A “State of Kubernetes Security” report released by Red Hat last year found that 94% of over 500 DevOps and engineering professionals surveyed had experienced container-related security issues or incidents the previous year.

Securing container environments is already a tricky proposition when considering the technology’s inherent complexity. The focus in recent months has been on minimizing the Kubernetes attack surface through tools to monitor network connections, ingress endpoints, Kubernetes audit logs, and new workloads as they are being deployed.

Not surprisingly, security will be covered extensively in the agenda for the upcoming KubeCon event in Valencia.

“I still feel like security is top of mind for a lot of folks; it has provided one of the biggest submissions from a quantity perspective,” Jasmine James, senior engineering manager of developer experience at Twitter Inc. and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chair, said during a pre-event interview with theCUBE. “There are tons of talks submitted for a security track and that kind of speaks for itself. This is something that the cloud-native community cares about, and there’s still a lot of innovation and people want to voice what they’re doing and share it.”

Livestream of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe is an in-person and virtual event, with special event coverage to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can watch theCUBE’s coverage live or on-demand after the event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s live coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

TheCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe includes in-depth interviews with Red Hat’s Kristen Newcomer, director of cloud and DevSecOps strategy; Connor Gorman, senior principal software engineer; Ramón Román Nissen, senior AppDev architect; and Guillaume Moutier, senior principal data engineering architect, as well as other Red Hat experts.

TheCUBE will also talk with Priyanka Sharma, executive director and general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Jim Walker, principal product evangelist at Cockroach Labs; Bassam Tabbara, founder and chief executive officer of Upbound; Alan Flower, chief technology officer and global head of cloud native labs at HCL Technologies; Varun Talwar, co-founder of Tetrate.io; and many more industry experts.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe. Neither Red Hat or 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