The latest Kubecon in Copenhagen was "extra dope" as Kelsey Hightower might say. Hightower is one of the leaders of the Kubernetes community, and Kubecon is the community's main event. And for sure, this year's Kubekon did have something extra special.
This edition of the Kubecon obliterated the previous record of attendees with more than 4,300 delegates from all over the world.
Even more impressive is that the number of people attending the event has almost tripled in one year. The number of active contributors to the main Kubernetes project also reflects this impressive growth. The Kubernetes project has seen over 35,000 pull requests (contributions) so far - from more than 1,600 contributors. Other CNCF initiatives show similar growth.
Why is Kubernetes so relevant and popular within the community? Kubernetes is aiming to build an open-source abstraction layer on top of physical or virtual infrastructure. This layer helps us deploy and manage an application's life-cycle. Many different cloud vendors have built vertical APIs and infrastructure silos. There is no interoperability or easy migration path between services built, on clouds like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. The Kubernetes community has been successful in building an open specification for the life-cycle management of applications. And even better, this works for applications designed and deployed either in the cloud or on-premise.
The Kubernetes project still has a long way to go until it is mature enough to be ready to address the Enterprise market. Even though it's not mature, it has been successful in creating a consensus among cloud vendors in their orchestration APIs. What was extra dope at Kubecon, was seeing major cloud vendors launching and presenting their own Kubernetes-as-a-Service offers:
Of course, there were many interesting technical sessions to learn from at Kubecon too. Kubernetes is becoming the de-facto open standard for cloud interoperability and applications orchestration. It is demonstrating that the foundation for cloud interoperability should not be the cloud resources, but rather applications that run on top. That's what this Kubecon demonstrated with its incredible numbers. Quoting a great talk from Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the future of cloud infrastructures is more and more #vmless ... and Kubernetes is the proof that the focus should be on applications as enablers of business success.
Do you want to know more about Open-Xchange and Kubernetes? Stay tuned!