The Smells of the Kubernetes Community

We discuss what we did at KubeCon, the recent VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 survey, and the smells of platform engineering maturity. Also, some tips on daily logging and to do list management.

Here is the original video recording if you're into that kind of thing.

As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

Links and Notes

• • The 2023 State of Kubernetes Survey is fully out. The new component is looking at the benefits of Kubernetes. 
    • Distro/service marketshare - VMware is steadily climbing up, yay!
    • Coté's multi-cloud usage take. Including a great chart from IDC on where workloads are living. More: we need to start thinking of "multi-cloud" as just meaning "all the computers and stuff we run." Putting the word "cloud" in there makes it seem like magic cloud stuff, when all we are/should be talking about is the entire, heterogeneous IT estate.
    • Something like 60% of people say it makes developer more productive, even more say there are operational benefits (64%). The developer productive part is confusing given the middling "shorten developer release cycle" figures over the years. But, whatever!
    • 10% drop in developers owning and managing Kubernetes.
    • Related, from McKinsey engineers: "As a rule of thumb, if developers spend more than, say, 10 to 20 percent of their coding time on container configuration, failover, security, or other infrastructure issues, it makes more sense to tackle these issues via CSP services instead, so that valuable time and skills can be reserved for functionality that serves the business."
  • An idea for how many apps are running in Kubernetes, finally! While writing blog posts for the survey, I found this: Gartner estimates that "by 2027, 25% of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10% in 2021." We're somewhere in between there in 2021, likely closer to 10% than 25%.

• KubeCon EU 2023

• • What's Ed's take - Edward Grigson actually did some work (unlike social loafers, like Coté)! E.g.: "FinOps for Platform Engineering – I spoke to their CEO at KubeconEU and got a demo. Looks good – very flexible and easy to use." Found three new vendors: Palantir Apollo, Mia.Platform, Port / Cortex.
  • Jon Collins @ GigaOm: lines still being drawn around the components, WebAssembly. Best of breed vs. integrated platform. Robot: "The cloud-native world is maturing, and a multi-platform architecture will help build better manageability and governance in the future." And, Robot summarizing his platform engineering take: "Platforms are important, but the author argues for the need for multi-platform engineering (MPE) to understand and manage multiple clouds, stacks, and toolchains.The MPE group should be focused on empowering and enabling its users, acting as a product group for the entire organization."
  • Daniel Bryant on dev stuff, full blog post.
  • VMware schwag review: people love metal water bottles, not so much bottle openers. There are a lot of gambling service people in EU crowds.
  • Software Defined Talk at/on KubeCon. Though I was one of the three people (t)here, I don't really remember what we talked about except the Dirk bread claw. So it goes with me and podcasts.
  • Ben was not at KubeCon EU (sadface) but his YouTube picks are:
    • Evolution of WASM: Past, Present, and Future - Bailey Hayes, Cosmonic
    • The State of Backstage in 2023 - Ben Lambert & Patrik Oldsberg, Spotify
    • Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development - Whitney Lee & Viktor Farcic
    • How to Blow up a Kubernetes Cluster - Felix Hoffmann, iteratec
• Platform Engineering Strategy stuff: Platform Maturity Model paper, draft here.