Kubecon 2022 review: Application-aware Kubernetes comes to town!

You might ask: all this is good, but where does Kubernetes technology stand in terms of maturity? How is the Kubernetes ecosystem evolving? And what are the implications of Kubernetes growing so fast in terms of adoption and interest? 

Well, for sure things are moving fast. On the floor we discovered a number of new companies and solutions we had not been aware of, in particular in the area of container security and operations. Yet, the Kubernetes ecosystem is still somewhat fragmented and customers are still looking for solutions that can enable them to better manage the complexity of Kubernetes applications.

Let’s take for example a keyword that appeared on many vendor booths: “cost”. No surprise here as customers often find themselves in a quandary, as the way Kubernetes resource management mechanisms work prompt developers and SREs in over-provisioning Kubernetes resources to avoid performance and resilience issues. Many of these solutions only provide what can be called “cost visibility”, which of course also represents an important need, in particular for companies running multi-cloud environments. Only few solutions also provide recommendations on how to improve cost efficiency, mostly by leveraging historical analysis of cost data or by forecasting the expected consumption. 

This should be compared to the approach taken by Akamas, that leverages AI techniques to make Kubernetes applications cost efficient based on observed behavior of each specific application under the dynamically varying workload (possibly also based on data provided by these cost visibility solutions), while also ensuring performance and other SLOs are matched. On this I would like to point out several of our own blog posts we devoted to this topic.

Another area of the exhibition floor where the interest from the attendees was tangible was the one devoted to CNCF open-source projects. Too bad it had not been placed at the very center of the conference!! Among the different projects, I cannot avoid mentioning the Keptn since Akamas is part of this interesting project (in addition to Dynatrace Cloud Automation Alliance), that has been growing thanks to the incredible work done by our friends Andi Grabner, Rob Jahn, and Henrik Rexed at Dynatrace we also had the pleasure to met again on the floor.

Talking about friends in Detroit, we had the pleasure to meet Giulio Roggero, CTO and Co-founder at Mia Platform, a leading Self-service Developer Portal solution. In case you missed this, Akamas and Mia Platform have recently established a partnership (see our Press Releases on Akamas and Mia Platfo [LINK] websites). Read more about the benefit Akamas brings to developers adopting Self-service Developer Portals to optimize Kubernetes applications and support digital innovation initiatives in this blog post.

We were also pleased to meet our friends at Sysdig and have direct evidence of the impressive success of their Falco project, which was the first runtime security project to join CNCF as an incubation-level project and has now become the open source standard for continuous risk and threat detection across Kubernetes, containers and cloud, downloaded by over 50 millions users. Kudos to Loris Degioanni and his team!

This year our guest star was a long-time Akamas friend: the recognized performance expert Scott Moore of Scott Moore Consulting. Scott runs a growingly successful YouTube podcast devoted to performance engineering and related topics. You may want to watch his recent interview with Stefano Doni, Akamas CTO and Co-founder.

Scott joined the Akamas booth staff in Detroit and helped the team to promote Akamas. On the final day at KubeCon, Scott recorded another interview with myself and Stefano, also available as his podcast episode #92.