State of stateful applications — KubeCon 2018 NA recap
My expectations of KubeCon North America 2018 were high and it passed with flying colors. It was the busiest I’ve ever been at a show — and I’ve been to quite a few.. In this blog I’ll look back on the discussions we had and the questions we fielded — I hope you’ll agree that they provide a useful window into how Kubernetes adoption is changing as it spreads.
Kubernetes has graduated in the field
The enterprise adoption of Kubernetes is clearly visible when you face questions like — “We are running Kafka on a 20 node Kubernetes cluster, it is time to upgrade Kubernetes from 1.8 to 1.12, we are exploring using a blue green deployment approach for our Kafka workloads across these clusters. Do you have anything to offer?”
Many users have moved from just exploring the idea of stateful workloads to resolving challenges around stateful application upgrades in a DevOps friendly way (try that with your traditional storage :)). It is also apparent that stateful applications are receiving maximum coverage of discussions around DevOps teams. For example, the Cloud Native Storage day was oversubscribed by more than 10 times. When we started OpenEBS a couple of years ago with the crazy idea of taking an open source cloud native approach to deliver storage and data management in Cloud Native environments I hoped but never expected this kind of interest. Who would have imagined that you would have 600+ KubeCon attendees on a waiting list for the Cloud Native Storage day?
Observability
Next observation you cannot miss is the sheer number of booths that showcased observability related solutions around Kubernetes. Some are just about logs, some are just about metrics, some are a mix of logs, metrics and tracing etc. But, it directly shows the readiness of Kubernetes for mainstream adoption for data sensitive applications or stateful applications. The Cortex project which recently made it to CNCF sandbox, is starting to gain many takers as a large scale Prometheus metrics platform. And of course …
