As container application adoption grows in the era of multicloud, Kubernetes gains attention as a tool for deploying and automating operations. As part of its evolution, Kubernetes needs to focus on application developers, according to Bryan Liles (pictured), senior staff engineer at VMware Inc.

“Infrastructure comes and goes. I have been doing this for decades,” said Liles, who is also co-chair of the KubeCon, a flagship conference hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “And I would like to speak to developers now, because we need to get back to the developers since they create the value. The thing that stays constant are people building applications.”

Liles spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. They discussed the highlights of the event and the challenges and future of Kubernetes. (* Disclosure below.)

The lessons of end-user companies

To find out the direction of the ecosystem’s evolution, one way is to look at what end-user companies are doing, according to Liles. “Watch what the advanced companies like Walmart and Target and CapitalOne are doing. I just think there are a lot of lessons to be learned,” he said. “They have a crazy amount of money, so if they are actually investing time in this, it might be a good idea.”

Another way to keep track of this development is to look at companies that are embracing the extension model of Kubernetes through custom-resource definitions and building things, Liles pointed out. “I think that there are going to be a lot more companies that are going to invest in this and actually deliver on these types of products,” he stated. “And I think that’s a very interesting space.”

One of the most interesting projects in the CNCF landscape is the Open Policy Agent, a general-purpose open-source policy engine that enables unified and context-aware policy enforcement across the stack. “Things like OPA and then like OpenTelemetry are two projects coming together and having even bigger goals. Let’s make observability easy,” Liles said.

There is room to move forward with more mature projects in the workplace space and in security, according to Liles. “I would like to see more security tools, and not just old-school check, check, check,” he stated. “There’s companies out there re-thinking security. Let’s do that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE