This year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event was overtly focused on developers while bringing a new crop of takeaways to the fore, including efforts to take Kubernetes more mainstream, deployments in cloud-native environments, and closing the skills gap.

“Ordinarily, you go to conferences and they’re geared toward IT managers … toward CIOs; this is very much geared toward the developers,” said Paul Gillin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “When you have the hearts and minds of the developers, the rest of the industry is sort of pulled along. This is ground zero for the hottest area of the entire computing industry right now.”

Gillin spoke with theCUBE guest co-hosts Keith Townsend and Enrico Signoretti at KubeCon, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE. They gave a detailed breakdown of the event’s first day, covering news, takeaways and predictions based on the keynotes and guest interviews. (* Disclosure below.)

Kubernetes’ sprawling landscape

While the idea of containers and automated app deployment was around long before Kubernetes existed, the platform was the single turning point for containerization, according to Gillin. Having already caught developer attention, the Kubernetes ecosystem has now tilted its focus to building distributed, microservice-based cloud-native applications.

Another hot button conversation at the event revolved around the changing roles of developers in this cloud-native ecosystem.

“It’s not that the original, traditional IT operations are disappearing, it’s just that they are giving resources to these new developers,” Signoretti explained. “It’s sort of a walled garden; you don’t see the wall, but it’s a walled garden. So they are giving you resources, and you use these resources like an internal cloud.”

Amidst the encouraging signs for the future of Kubernetes and cloud-native culture, one glaring area of concern is a pronounced technology skills gap — especially in the United States. The pandemic exacerbated this problem.

“Skills are a long-term problem,” Gillin explained. “The U.S. educational system is turning out about 10% of the skilled people that the industry needs every year, and no one I know sees an end to that issue anytime soon.”

Lastly, as the lines that were normalized between development and operations teams become blurred, companies must rethink these confluence points and figure out how much knowledge and infrastructure control can be shared, the analysts said.

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

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event. Neither Red Hat, the main sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE