Kubernetes: the cloud-native hydra

Move fast and <create> things

Cloud native moves fast, doesn’t it?

But each KubeCon is an opportunity to pause in this frenetic race and take stock of how far the community has come.

This year, as we look ahead to our gathering in Paris, it’s inarguable that Kubernetes is not just evolving, it’s mutating.

Our research found that 56% of businesses have more than 10 Kubernetes clusters, and 69% run Kubernetes in multiple clouds or other environments — with 80% expecting their scale to grow. 

Kubernetes is spreading into all kinds of different use cases, each with very different environments and challenges. It’s testament to the versatility of Kubernetes as the “de facto OS” for the cloud-native era that it can adapt to all these environments. You could even see it as survival of the fittest in action.

As a multi-environment K8s management platform provider, here at Spectro Cloud we have the perfect vantage point to see these adaptations in action… and even encourage them.

SaaS, PaaS… KaaS?

Inside the enterprise, in the world of platform engineering teams, we see companies using Kubernetes as a driver for standardization. They see at last one technology, enhanced by universal translators like CNCF’s Cluster API, to bridge their multiple public and data centers, bringing a shared ‘language’ to a world of siloes. 

More importantly they see Kubernetes, when built right, as the engine for a new kind of experience. You could call it ‘clusters as a service’, or Kubernetes as a service, at incredible scale: a streamlined, even self-service experience meeting the needs of dozens of different business units and thousands of developers who just want to deploy their code in a safe, easy way. 

For these enterprise platform teams (and really, this is what’s driving the trend towards ‘platform engineering’), the challenge is how to achieve on the one hand the velocity and choice that devs want, and on the other the control and consistency that the business needs. 

It’s far from easy. With scale comes complexity, and with complexity? Well. 75% suffer from interoperability issues that affect the running of their clusters, up from 66% in 2022. 40% say they lack the skills and headcount to manage Kubernetes.

Solve this equation? It’s an intoxicating opportunity: the key to boring old IT evolving from a cost center to a driver of measurable innovation and business value.

Kubernetes InsideⓇ

Elsewhere we see ISVs of all shapes and sizes using Kubernetes and containers as a delivery vehicle for their customer-facing software, sometimes built into hardware as a unified deployable stack, sometimes hosted as SaaS for different tenants to access, equally often deployed locally in client sites — but always multitenant. 

They’re looking to the portability of containers and the resilience and scalability of Kubernetes to deliver a quality customer experience in a world that has, at last, defiantly left virtual machines behind.

But how do you make sure that customers have the right experience, no matter what their environment looks like? How do you keep their instance up and performing, and their data secure? And, most importantly, how do you do all that without burning all your margin along the way?

Bare metal is back

Many organizations are starting to wonder if Kubernetes is at last the tool to unlock a return to bare metal, promising an end to hypervisor overhead (both performance and financial), and just maybe a new home for their orphaned VM workloads for hybrid app development too. 

We can’t think what triggered this… let us know if anything has happened, will you?

Whatever unspoken event is the cause, there’s fuel on the fire. Companies are earnestly looking at bare metal. They’re looking at projects like KubeVirt. Now is the time to modernize and rethink 20 years of legacy, before the burning platform sinks for good.

And when they’re looking at this shift? It’s time to avoid making the same mistakes again. Lock-in and proprietary solutions won’t serve us in this new era. Choice, open standards and portability are the new requirements.

From cloud to edge

For other businesses, Kubernetes is the gateway to making edge computing happen at scale, with freedom from proprietary and manual stacks, and from manual processes. 

They’re putting K8s and containers on the ‘fat edge’ in micro data centers, and even on small form-factor devices under counters and in backroom cupboards across the built environment. 

Here what keeps them up at night is cost (of deployment, of field engineering, of downtime) and that ever-present fear, security. 

Open source projects, community organizations like LF Edge, government bodies, and bold hardware and software vendors are tackling these challenges with gusto. They know their efforts matter, unlocking the economics of edge scale. 

And already we’re seeing triumphs. Companies like agritech startup Tevel, or dental equipment manufacturer Dentsply, have cracked the code. They are seeing results others can only dream of.

All things, to all people

These are different worlds, with different challenges, different stacks, different teams, different hardware, different scales. Wherever you look, Kubernetes is there, the one common factor. This is the real indicator of Kubernetes maturity: it’s evolved into a chameleon. And an unkillable one. 

Kubernetes has many different faces; that’s its strength. Those that focus on the distribution, or who get opinionated about the stack, are missing the point: whether you use an edge distro like K3s or roll your own from pure upstream, it doesn’t matter. The more the merrier, and for each situation there’s the perfect distro out there — just as there is the perfect stack of service mesh, observability, storage and many other layers. Already our research found that 39% of businesses have more than 10 cloud native integrations in their Kubernetes stacks and 83% use multiple Kubernetes distributions.

We as a community need to focus on this jungle of cloud-native innovation as the strength it is, rather than an enervating force of complexity. Let’s embrace the choice, embrace the mutation. Hail hydra!

Explore the latest innovations with us

We’ll be at KubeCon in booth J24, and at Edge Day on Tuesday 19th March before the main event starts. Join us to discover our latest innovations and cutting-edge open source technologies, or come and watch our sessions on Friday 22nd, where we’ll be introducing a new 2-node HA edge architecture, and our customer Dentsply will be sharing how it built a scalable edge infrastructure on Kubernetes. Check out all our activities right here: https://info.spectrocloud.com/kubecon-europe-2024-paris