KubeCon NA 2022 Tech Trends: DevX, Platform Dev, Security & More
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 was full of incredible energy with the community. Nothing compares to spending time with partners, friends and colleagues while learning — and even coding together onsite (go ContribFests!).
A few trends stood out for us at Intuit, from the future of the community to the future of the industry. Would love to hear your thoughts about this year’s conference, so please share in the comments section!
#1 Pivotal drivers for development velocity: platform-first mindset, application abstraction, “golden path” for dev experiences
The industry is shifting from a DevOps-first mindset to a platform-first mindset to drive development velocity, by focusing on abstraction and development experiences. The general trend in sessions, and highlighted during the CNCF’s analyst and end user panel discussion, it’s not that the DevOps developer is “over” but that it’s evolving.
“Why, after all these years we’ve all been talking about it, has DevOps not taken off more than it has?” asked Charlotte Dunlap, research director at analysis firm GlobalData.
“If we are hoping that every company would [use] Google-inspired infrastructure for all [applications] — that is not what has taken off,” replied Priyanka Sharma, executive director at CNCF. “Companies have made big strides in becoming technology-first, and that may not have happened with everyone knowing everything in the whole software development and delivery lifecycle … I would disagree that it hasn’t taken off; it just looks different than we would have imagined.” [TechTarget full article]
Across conversations, sessions, and in open source tooling, it’s become clear that the future of development experience is abstracted. Developers acknowledge that while Kubernetes is powerful, it’s still not “easy” for application developers. So simplification, with a powerful UI, is the future state to not only streamline day-to-day experiences for app developers, but automate overhead for the entire platforming team.
“…using an application abstraction also helps the platform teams revise much faster because then they don’t have to worry about writing technical service bulletins to make sure that the developer teams are migrating to a new solution” Anusha Ragunathan, Principal Software Engineer, Intuit [NewStack full article]
As an industry, we’re on a journey to building the “Golden Path,” with Backstage quickly gaining visibility within the CNCF community for its open platform for building developer portals. For highlights of the first BackstageCon co-located event, see here.
#2 Organizations turn to open source to drive innovation in tough economic times
A common thread throughout the conference is the trend toward increased adoption of open source when the economy fluctuates. Leaders view open source as a business driver and enabler, versus a cost center, because it helps them reduce costs and improves their ability to innovate. Priyanka Sharma underscored this point in the opening keynote, citing Gartner’s prediction that cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives by 2025, up from less than 40% in 2021.
Underpinning this trend is the critical need for community support of our global ecosystem of maintainers and providing ways for more people to become contributors, a point highlighted by CNCF during the conference. Over 1000 maintainers support over 7million developers! Great to see a growing number of companies, such as Boeing, making it a top priority to “contribute directly to all CNCF incubating and graduated projects.”
#3 An emerging technology opportunity: “It’s not privacy vs. security anymore”
During a Protocol-moderated panel during the KubeCon CTO Summit, CIO leadership called out the need for today’s companies to build security and privacy into the product development process from the beginning, and to learn and collaborate across the organization, and in partnership with the industry at large.
“If an organization wants to function in today’s world, data and privacy has to be core to your business…while everyone is looking at the same data, we’re coming at it from different perspectives and that just enhances the conversation.” Elise Houlik, Chief Privacy Officer, Intuit
In other security trends, supply chain vulnerabilities and implementation continues to be a hot topic as the industry defines best practices— this showed up in over 17 sessions across the event. Check out this resource from the CNCF.
#4 Open source technologies gain traction: GitOps, Wasm, OpenTelemetry
- Provisioning infrastructure, and using GitOps for infrastructure and workloads, this in parallel with the broad adoption of Argo, is becoming table stakes.
- The potential for Wasm (WebAssembly) to transform web apps is gaining widespread recognition for, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
- We’re seeing accelerated adoption of OpenTelemetry in CNCF community as a critical enabler for the evolution of cloud-native observability and reliability.
Curious to hear your takeaways from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, so please comment here! And, if this blog has sparked your curiosity about cloud-native tech innovation at Intuit, view our KubeCon NA 2022 Session Playlist and visit here to join our talent community. We’re hiring!
