KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 did not disappoint and has picked up from last year. This event was held both virtually and live in Valencia, Spain, May 16-20, and included over 26,000 registered attendees, from developers, product management, DevOps, IT ops, architects, and executives. There were over 9,000 companies in attendance across multiple industries.
My full coverage of this event can be found in my TechTarget article titled “Highlights from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022.”
Cloud-native Growth and Kubernetes Adoption
The event was focused on accelerating the growth of organizations with their cloud-native adoption. This is not surprising, as our May 2022 Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey, Distributed Cloud Series: Cloud-Native Applications, shows cloud-native adoption is accelerating rapidly.
In ESG research, we see:
- 31% of respondents say their organizations use between 250 to 499 total business applications — container-based or not container-based.
- 71% of respondents say their container-based applications are, or will be, deployed in a public cloud environment or hybrid method, a combination of public cloud platforms and private data centers.
- In 2020, in a separate research study, 39% of organizations surveyed say they had run production workloads on container technology for the previous 12 to 23 months.
The IT skills gap was also a very real concern at the event. Organizations want to modernize, but are challenged with finding the appropriate resources to allow for the growth required for the business.
Briefings by the Numbers
I had a number of briefings at this event — actually, 25 over three days. It was exciting, informative and interesting to understand what vendors are doing to help organizations meet their modernization needs.
One of the biggest challenges is overcoming Day 2 failure and delay, which is driven by the IT skills gap and causing organizations to struggle to meet business needs. This lines up with what we are seeing at ESG. For example, our 2021 Data Infrastructure Trends survey of 359 IT and business professionals found that 67% of organizations are looking to hire IT generalists over IT specialists. So, the focus is for vendors to reduce the complexity for these solutions.
Paul’s Final Point of View
This event did not disappoint. First of all, after the past few years of virtual-only events, it was exciting to attend a live conference and hear the latest messaging and positioning around Kubernetes in person. Walking on the show floor and discovering how the vendors mentioned above are approaching challenges in the marketplace was truly insightful.
I needed an additional week to hear from the many other vendors I was unable to connect with at the conference and understand their approach to organizational challenges — hopefully, I will get to them in 2023! In addition, the research we have been conducting at ESG aligns with the approaches covered, and I look forward to continuing these conversations, as well as watching vendors evolve to continually meet industry challenges.
