Industry Trends from KubeCon EU '23

KubeCon is a fantastic event for everything one wants to learn about Kubernetes and its community. This year we saw 10000 people attending KubeCon in Amsterdam with multiple pre-events, exciting conversations, new ideas, and fantastic technology showcases. Modernization, Sustainability, Management, Operations, and GitOps were all themes in full bloom, just like the beautiful tulips all around.

We had the fantastic opportunity to attend the KubeCon EU 23 on April 18 to April 21, 2023.  One of our favorite activities during the conference was to visit the booths and talk with different companies to learn about the problem they were trying to solve and their solutions.

Based on our discussions and findings, we list the top 4 industry trends we recognized from these discussions.

Security and Identity

As we saw growth in the community and the participants at KubeCon EU, which was most refreshing, we also saw the interest in Security solutions, patterns, and practices. And for us, it was great to see the focus on security by the KubeCon organizing team by giving it a track “Security and Identity.” This is a recognition of all the hard work the community and vendors put into ensuring secure solutions via DevSecOps, Supply chain security, identity management, and more. This also resonates with the “Red Hat 2022 State of Kubernetes Security” report identifying critical findings. There were multiple sessions on Secret Management, Identities, Zero-trust, etc. And security vendors like CyberArk also showcasing their solutions, amongst others.

Moving into cloud-native patterns such as microservices or event-driven architecture also means the release cycles are shortened. Decoding that, it's obviously more development velocity and release velocity. Keeping track of the dependencies hit by CVEs, or the production process hit by vulnerabilities gets harder. Developers are more focused on development velocity and rightly so. This year the trend was around Supply chain security, ensuring every component used is secured, e.g., via SBoMs. 75% of codebases now consist of open source code. Organizations want to be able to secure software and also keep accelerated innovation in motion. Furthermore, also stated in the “Red Hat 2022 State of Kubernetes Security,” 67% reported delaying and slowing down deployment due to Kubernetes security concerns.

Suggested readings:
Red Hat Introduces Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain. Software supply chain solution adds new Red Hat Trusted Content and Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline services, helping to bolster foundational application security and business resiliency.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (ACS)  for Kubernetes is the pioneering Kubernetes-native security platform, equipping organizations to build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications more securely.

E-book: Path to GitOps.  This book outlines the tools, workflows, and structures that teams need to enable a complete GitOps workflow for practitioners just starting or considering developing their own GitOps practice.

App Modernization at Scale

Application Modernization is critical to continue the adoption of containers and Kubernetes. Modernization is a journey that involves all parties to be part of it in its early stages by considering platforms, tools, and practices around it. Learn the Key Takeaways on Reflecting on Large-Scale Cloud-Native Modernizations at KubeCon 23 about the panel discussion.  

At Red Hat, we believe in the power of the community to create better solutions and products. Red Hat offers a Migration Toolkit For Applications based on our Konveyor community. MTA Will guide you through the modernization process, understanding your application landscape to make decisions on migrations stages, timeframes, and prioritization.

The right platform is critical for developers to build and deploy their workloads freely without concern about their underlying infrastructure.

With Red Hat OpenShift, developers are not tight to specific underlying infrastructure; platform engineers can provide the same end-user experience despite their desired underlying platform.

Whatever your choice of infrastructure, whether you are on-prem, edge, public, or private cloud. Red Hat OpenShift will give you the freedom to create and the power to innovate.

Innovate with Red Hat on the cloud:

• Red Hat on AWS
• Red Hat on Azure

Innovate with Red Hat on edge:

• Red Hat Edge

If you are looking to accelerate your modernization journey, follow up with Customized guidance when you need it with Red Hat.

Developer Experience

Developers are the end users of the platform, which interact directly or indirectly to build and deploy their workloads in the Kubernetes Platform. Different companies will set up their guidelines for how developers interact with Kubernetes. Ultimately, they are all looking for the same, which is bringing the software development process to its peak efficiency by decreasing complexity and learning curve.

We found different solutions to enhance the Developer Experience from IDPs, Developer Platforms, or other tools promoting better tools for developers that enhance their experience, are easy to learn, reduce complexity and provide extra capabilities. More on Cloud-native Platforms: What and Why? from discussions held at the OpenShift Commons Gathering.

Red Hat will meet you where you are, depending on your enterprise environment restrictions, skill sets and role. From resolving the inner loop experience by testing locally in your own computer your source code is an image.

Explore our solutions on the following links:

• How the new RHEL 9.2 improves the developer experience

• DevSpaces experience Video tutorial
• Transform your container workflow with Podman Desktop

• Podman Desktop 1.0: Local container development made easy

• Kasten K10 and OpenShift: Data Resiliency and Policy-based back-ups
• Providing Disaster Recovery for ROSA Clusters, From OpenShift Commons Gathering, Amsterdam 2023
• OpenShift Data Foundation and Advanced Cluster Management: Automated Disaster Recovery failover and failback with Red Hat OpenShift

At Red Hat, we believe that developers should have the freedom to create and be empowered to innovate their applications in a streamline way. Red Hat joined the Backstage.io community to empower developers to develop their applications. More about Janus our Developer Portal built on top of Backstage. More about how Janus and Red Hat Developer Hub A developer’s guide to Red Hat Developer Hub and Janus.

Multi-Cluster management

Kubernetes adoption leads to Multi/Hybrid deployments and this has been noticed at KubeCon this year for a number of reasons: Application distribution in different geographic locations, disaster recovery and edge use-cases are just some of them. And you heard it from us first - Red Hat has been investing in the Open Hybrid Cloud strategy and has been doing it well and for a long time. We continue to partner with communities, customers and partners, and we iterate with intent, to continue building momentum around our solution's capabilities.

OpenShift is proven to be a bullet-proof enterprise platform for running containerized applications. To keep up with the latest trends in this space, Red Hat now continues to extend the platform and its ecosystem so developers can continue to easily build and run applications, get the most of the Kubernetes API experience, without having Kubernetes multiplicity concerns. It’s worth also mentioning that recent buzz around Zero-Trust architectures and networking can also take advantage of a hybrid strategy.

That’s where OpenShift Platform Plus comes into play. OpenShift Platform Plus provides users with Advanced Cluster Management capabilities. This solution will allow you to make sure your teams can focus on keeping the software development velocity while not slowing down your business, worrying about the hassle of maintaining a scalable and trustable distributed kubernetes infrastructure to run your services. Red Hat® Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is based on the Open Cluster Management, a CNCF open source project, and it offers end-to-end visibility and control for managing your cluster and application lifecycles. Among other features, it can also ensure security and compliance for your entire Kubernetes domain across multiple data centers and public clouds. Take a look in the below resources to know more or see the trial experience.

Suggested readings:

• Blog: 5 Reasons to Upgrade from OpenShift Container Platform to OpenShift Platform Plus
• How Multi-Cluster Kubernetes and Developer IDPs connect? Check this blog to see the Janus project we mentioned earlier in this article and how it connects to Multi-Cluster environments: Open Cluster Management plugin for Backstage
• This WG Policy update includes what’s the work we have been doing to ensure security in the Kubernetes fleet by using Kubernetes policies.Policy Matters! A Policy Working Group Introduction and Deep Dive - Jim Bugwadia & Frank Jogeleit

Back-ups and Disaster recovery

The evolution and success in the cloud native era has presented us with an amazing set of possibilities but also enormous challenges. Glue together all these open-source pieces and make it an pleasant experience is one of the things that we strive to offer. On the data perspective, Data resiliency and Data sovereignty are hot topics. Thankfully, Red Hat’s open position has established great partnerships with vendors like Veeam (Kasten K10) and NetApp, among others, to provide all the data services needed in this era. All of these amazing capabilities are just some clicks away due to the Red Hat Marketplace catalog and to the work we do in the Operator Lifecycle Manager project and enable it in OpenShift clusters with the OpenShift Operator Hub.

Be sure to check out some of the back-up, disaster recovery, other data-driven solutions here:

More about Innovation from Red Hat Summit NewsRoom 2023