Last month the Akamas team joined 7000+ attendees as Silver sponsor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022, organized in Detroit by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
What a great time we had, meeting customers, partners and experts from around the globe, and the whole vibrant CNCF community!
Here are my thoughts and takeaways from the conference. The short version: nobody at KubeCon 2022 questioned Kubernetes adoption any more. Cost had become the word of the show. “Cost” appeared on booth after booth in Detroit. Most of those products show you what you are spending. Only a few tell you which configuration to change. That gap is where the Akamas application-aware approach to Kubernetes optimization sits.
Where is Kubernetes now?
As we all know, Kubernetes is the de-facto operating system of modern cloud-native applications. CNCF reported that about 5.6 million developers use Kubernetes worldwide, or 31% of all backend developers. That is impressive adoption for a project first accepted into the CNCF program in 2016, and now at Graduate level. The same CNCF Annual Survey estimates that 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes, up from 83% in 2020 and 78% in 2019.
The attendance figures reflect that adoption. According to the organizers, about 7000 people attended in person, not counting those joining remote sessions and virtual booths. These numbers just match those of this year’s European event in Valencia. You can read my notes on KubeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia for the comparison. Still, they represent a clear recovery from last year’s event in Los Angeles. I was also impressed by the number of tweets about the conference during this month: almost 100,000. Those topics are gaining tremendous traction.
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 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 container security and operations. Yet the Kubernetes ecosystem is still somewhat fragmented. Customers are still looking for solutions that help them manage the complexity of Kubernetes applications.
Kubernetes cost optimization was the keyword on every booth
Let’s take for example a keyword that appeared on many vendor booths: “cost”. No surprise here. The way Kubernetes resource management mechanisms work pushes developers and SREs into over-provisioning Kubernetes resources, to avoid performance and resilience issues.
Many of these solutions only provide what can be called “cost visibility”. That is an important need in itself, in particular for companies running multi-cloud environments. Only a few solutions also recommend how to improve cost efficiency. Those recommendations mostly come from historical analysis of cost data, or from forecasting expected consumption.
Compare this with the approach taken by Akamas. Akamas uses AI techniques to make Kubernetes applications cost efficient based on the observed behavior of each specific application, under a dynamically varying workload. It can also consume the data these cost visibility solutions produce. And it does all this while 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.
CNCF open-source projects deserved center stage
Another area of the exhibition floor drew tangible interest from attendees: 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 Keptn, since Akamas is part of this interesting project, in addition to the Dynatrace Cloud Automation Alliance. Keptn has been growing thanks to the incredible work of our friends Andi Grabner, Rob Jahn and Henrik Rexed at Dynatrace, whom we had the pleasure to meet again on the floor.
Friends and partners in Detroit: Mia Platform and Sysdig
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 release.
Read more about the benefits Akamas brings to developers adopting Self-service Developer Portals in this blog post.
We were also pleased to meet our friends at Sysdig and to see direct evidence of the impressive success of their Falco project. Falco was the first runtime security project to join CNCF as an incubation-level project. It has now become the open source standard for continuous risk and threat detection across Kubernetes, containers and cloud, downloaded by over 50 million users. Kudos to Loris Degioanni and his team!
Our guest star at the booth: performance expert Scott Moore
This year our guest star was a long-time Akamas friend: the recognized performance expert Scott Moore of Scott Moore Consulting. Scott runs a fast-growing 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 promote Akamas. On the final day at KubeCon, Scott recorded another interview with myself and Stefano, also available as his podcast episode #92.
… and where is Akamas?
I believe we have embarked on a very interesting journey. Of course, we are perfectly aware of where we stand. We at Akamas, joined by just a few other companies and customers, are pioneers in a brand new approach to application performance and cost optimization based on AI.
We are still a small (and agile) company. Yet in the last 18 months we had tremendous growth in customer base, product adoption and tangible results. Please read more on our success stories and results on optimizing Kubernetes applications.
And we are proud of the innovation and quality we are delivering. In particular, last September we released version 3.0 of our AI-powered optimization platform. That release is a major milestone for Akamas. With the introduction of live optimizations, Akamas now supports both pre-production and production environments, meaning live applications under varying workloads.
The Akamas application-aware approach operates at both the infrastructure layer and the application layer. Applied to Kubernetes microservices applications, it has been proven to let companies achieve cost efficiency and service quality without compromising application performance and resilience.
In addition to the interview by Scott mentioned above, I would also point you to other interviews with the Akamas CTO: the TestGuild interview by Joe Colantonio and the TFIR article, also available in an extended version. The recent updated coverage paper by 451 Research is available to download from the Akamas website too.
If you want to learn more, join us for the upcoming Ignite by Akamas webinar, currently planned for late January. We will share our stories of how Akamas live optimization helped customers make their Kubernetes applications more efficient without compromising on quality.
Well, thanks for reading my notes! Feel free to send your comments directly to me or to Akamas.
And see you next year for the 2023 editions of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Amsterdam (April, 17-21) and Chicago (November, 6-11).
Stay tuned!
FAQs
What were the main themes at KubeCon North America 2022?
Cost dominated the vendor booths in Detroit. Container security and operations tooling was the fastest-growing category on the floor. CNCF open-source projects drew heavy attendee interest. Kubernetes adoption itself was no longer in question.
How many people attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022?
About 7000 people attended in person in Detroit, plus those joining remote sessions and virtual booths. That figure just matches KubeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia. It is a clear recovery from the 2021 North America event in Los Angeles.
How widely was Kubernetes adopted in 2022?
CNCF reported about 5.6 million Kubernetes developers worldwide, or 31% of all backend developers. An estimated 96% of organizations were using or evaluating Kubernetes. That figure was 83% in 2020 and 78% in 2019.
What is the difference between Kubernetes cost visibility and Kubernetes cost optimization?
Cost visibility reports what you are spending. Cost optimization changes the configuration that causes the spending. Most tools at KubeCon 2022 did the first. Only a few recommended what to change, and those recommendations came mostly from historical cost data or consumption forecasts.
What does application-aware Kubernetes optimization mean?
Application-aware optimization tunes the application layer and the infrastructure layer together. Akamas observes how each specific application behaves under a dynamically varying workload. It then sets resources and configuration to meet SLOs at lower cost. Cost savings therefore do not come at the expense of performance or resilience.
