I’ve been going to KubeCon and CloudNativeCon for a long time — I first spoke at Cloud Native Day back in 2016 on cloud native in the enterprise, which was incredibly early and immature at that point.

Now Kubernetes is mainstream and serves as the default deployment location for new and modernized applications. It’s so dominant that it’s receiving meaningful pushback as not being the right answer for all problems. Some people will even contend that it was never the right answer for any of those problems.

As in-person events resumed once we had Covid vaccinations, I returned to KubeCon to continue tracking the ecosystem. I went to Los Angeles in late 2021, which — despite the ongoing pandemic and strict measures — still drew 3,500 in-person registrants, of which 40% were end users. Those end users were quite visible outside of the expo hall, although most sponsors I spoke with felt like they weren’t seeing booth traffic. This step toward bringing in end users is highly significant because it meant that it wasn’t just a bunch of vendors all marketing to each other. End users came back to learn and network, as soon as their travel policies allowed them to do so.

In 2022, I went to Detroit, which drew almost 7,500 attendees in-person. This was the first late-Covid KubeCon that truly felt like a big conference again, whereas the LA event felt rather empty in such a huge venue. In 2022, the rise of developer environments was a big deal, but it quickly faded. A couple of startups are still around, but most of the flash has moved onwards.

In 2023, I attended at both Amsterdam and Chicago. Amsterdam brought almost 10,500 in-person attendees, while Chicago was closer to 9,000. Especially with restrictions on travel policies that began with Covid, KubeCon EU in Amsterdam was the first event I’d attended since early 2020 that had a large European contingent (76% in-person). The rise of generative AI was extremely clear in 2023, even as early as Amsterdam in April.

The videos from last fall’s event came out just before the holidays, and looking at the most popular ones (anything with >1,000 views, as of this writing) provides a window into broader interest:

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that there wasn’t even more popularity for the AI talks. Other than that, the most interesting topic to arise at this level of interest is the talk on Nix for Kubernetes. Nix has arisen over recent years as an under-the-radar package manager that draws a good deal of interest from top-tier developers, but its complexity holds many back from jumping in.

For KubeCon overall, if you prefer the “one-stop shop” approach of huge events, where you can meet with everyone (key vendors and partners, other end users), as well as keep yourself and your team up to speed on the latest and greatest, KubeCon will serve you well.

If you’re looking for smaller, more intimate events that are still Kubernetes-focused, take a look at some of the official pre-events (mini-conference focused on specific technologies, like Cilium or Backstage) as well as Cloud Native Rejekts, which typically happens the weekend prior to KubeCon.

Key takeaways

Overall, the trends I’ve observed in recent KubeCons, and with the Kubernetes ecosystem as a whole, are clear:

  • Continued maturity of Kubernetes users. At events, you see more and more people in suits from end-user organizations walking around, indicative of more executive buy-in on Kubernetes deployments.
  • Sponsor presence also supported this maturation. There’s a growing emphasis on more vendors in security, compliance, and cost management. There’s also more professional-services firms focused on migrations (from boutiques to global SIs). Both of those are common end-user requirements to succeed with Kubernetes.
  • Smaller trends continue to surface and fade against this larger backdrop of maturation. For example, there were a sizable number of small startups focused on developer environments in 2022, while many of them had faded away in 2023.
  • Generative AI rose to popularity in 2023. A number of startups showed up at KubeCon with meaningful use cases focused on both developers and platform engineers, especially around test generation, docs generation, and ChatOps.

Disclosures: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation covered my travel costs for KubeCon NA 2023.

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