In advance of last year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, analysts for SiliconANGLE described the event as the “new school” where software innovation was showcased. As this year’s gathering prepares to kick off in the second week of November, school will be back in session, the students will be a year older and the list of innovative new tools will be greater than ever before.

“It’s just a growing number of open-source projects and new innovations that are solving problems overall in this cloud-native ecosystem,” said Joe Fernandes, vice president and GM, Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Red Hat Inc. “There’s this whole vibrant ecosystem of projects that continues exploding around Kubernetes.”

Fernandes spoke during a pre-conference interview with Dave Vellante, industry analyst for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. TheCUBE’s analysts will be on the ground in Chicago for three days of KubeCon coverage, starting November 7, bringing news and analysis from key industry thought leaders and company executives on the latest developments in the rapidly advancing cloud-native field. (* Disclosure below.)

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Joe Fernandes:

Focus on GitOps

The explosion of projects described by Fernandes sets the table for what promises to be an intriguing KubeCon event in November. One of those initiatives involves ArgoCD, a continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that automates deployment of desired application states in specified target environments.

The project is a key development in the area of GitOps, an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices in application development and applies them to infrastructure automation. Red Hat has noticed growing interest among developers in ArgoCD through its use within the company’s OpenShift containerized solution, according to Fernandes.

“We’ve seen a lot of adoption of GitOps, and Argo is right at the center of that,” Fernandes noted. “They are using it in different ways. They are leveraging GitOps to automate the configuration and deployment of applications that they’re bringing on to Kubernetes through OpenShift, and then they’re using it to deploy OpenShift clusters themselves.”

The field of CI/CD is hardly new, yet Fernandes points out that growth in ArgoCD adoption is part of new solutions and approaches that are more Kubernetes-native or cloud-native than what has been seen before.

Security and AI

Another key area that will be a central focus at KubeCon will be security. In addition to ArgoCD, projects such as Tekton Chains and Sigstore are building momentum among developers interested in more robust supply chain safeguards.

Tekton Chains is a security subsystem of the Kubernetes Tekton CI/CD pipeline, and Sigstore, which was originally prototyped by Red Hat, automates digital signing and verification of software elements.

“We’re seeing things like Tekton and Argo come together with Sigstore to create more automated processes for securing the supply chain,” Fernandes said. “When you’re building these images, you are building them securely up front and then you are building a software bill of materials of those images so that you can ensure it is secure once you put it out to production.”

Artificial intelligence will assuredly be a prime topic at KubeCon in November. One area of interest to developers involves machine learning operations, or MLOps, which is becoming more critical as prompt engineering for natural language processing grows in complexity.

“You start to hear more about MLOps type workflows,” Fernandes said. “I have projects in both OpenShift and Ansible to bring AI in to provide a better experience to my end users. AI is one of the killer workloads for the hybrid cloud because AI needs to run where your data lives and data lives everywhere.”

Moving to the edge

There will likely be plenty of discussion about the open hybrid cloud at KubeCon because enterprise customers are beginning to migrate more workloads and applications to the edge. This trend is being driven by the rise of AI.

Gartner Inc. believes that over 55% of the data analysis performed by deep neural networks will take place at the edge by 2025. In 2021, the metric for this was less than 10%.

As SiliconANGLE has recently reported, major cloud providers are introducing a significant number of new tools for AI along with frameworks to implement these at the edge. AWS’ IoT Greengrass ML Inference runs machine learning models trained on local hardware. Microsoft now offers Azure IoT Edge where models trained in the cloud can be edge-deployed.

“We always knew there wasn’t going to be one destination for all enterprise apps because enterprise customers have thousands and tens of thousands of applications,” Fernandes said. “Now edge is becoming a thing in terms of moving those workloads out to the factory floor for manufacturers, out to retail locations, out to cell phone towers for our telco providers. People want to move those AI workloads right to where the data is generated.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event from Nov. 7-9. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event, 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 podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

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

Guests

Stay tuned for theCUBE’s complete guest list during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event here.

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

Image: SiliconANGLE