It’s been nearly 10 years since Kubernetes first launched, and the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event has been running almost as long. Today, there’s a vibrant ecosystem of projects that continue to explode around the open source technology that revolutionized containerized data management.

Exploring that ecosystem was a central focus of last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. It’s an area witnessing growing stability around the open-source and Kubernetes community, according to theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante.

“Go back eight or nine years, it was pretty basic. The focus was on simplicity and getting adoption up,” Vellante said during a pre-conference interview with Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud platforms at Red Hat Inc. “The original committers made some tough decisions: ‘Let’s mature it over time. Let’s not try to do too much at once.’ Now you’re seeing the impacts of that.”

Analysts for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with key industry thought leaders and company executives during the event. They explored the latest developments in the rapidly advancing cloud-native field and the list of innovative new tools being presented. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed from the KubeCon + CloudNative Con NA event:

1. Artificial intelligence has entered the conversation.

Analysts with theCUBE have been to every single KubeCon since its inception. Since that time, fresh faces have been coming in and the overall growth of the community at large has been phenomenal, according to John Furrier (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE.

“Open source continues to power the innovation,” Furrier said. “As AI hits center stage, we’re going to talk about that a lot here. AI and open source, big conversation. Do you go close? Do you go proprietary? Do you stay open? Open source continues to dominate.”

For co-analyst Rob Strechay, the opening day’s keynote suggested a clear focus: “AI, AI, more AI.” There was also a focus on sustainability and green compute.

“That was the two big themes coming across this morning. How are we going to do this responsibly?” Strechay said. “I think part of it is, if you start to look at AI, it’s not exactly the greenest of technologies where you have ChatGPT using 16 ounces of water for every five prompts it takes in.”

Still, AI represents a generational shift for developers, especially when one considers open source. The infrastructure for AI has now been laid through Kubernetes as that scheduler, according to theCUBE co-analyst Dustin Kirkland (right).

“Call it the large language models and all the open source on the top of that,” he said. “Now bringing that to other industry verticals, I think there is a ton of hundred-million-dollar to billion-dollar businesses to be built around taking those nuggets of AI and that insight and applying it to ed tech, to health tech, elsewhere,” Kirkland said.

At the end of the event, one question rose to the top: Could Kubernetes meet the AI challenge? It was clear that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation had jumped on the bandwagon of AI, but they may be a little late to the game, according to Andy Thurai (second from right), vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.

“CNCF is known for providing open source and bringing this massive developer base into helping things out with the cloud, which they did a really good job [with]. If you look at all the projects that graduated, Kubernetes is right at the top,” Thurai said. “Prometheus, everybody uses it, right? So, that portion of it, they nailed it. With AI, they’re still trying to figure out, ‘What do we want to do with it?’”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Andy Thurai, John Furrier, Dustin Kirkland and Savannah Peterson (second from left):

2. The CNCF ecosystem is being seen as key.

From the perspective of the CNCF, the road forward is all about new innovations and a mix of a wide range of participants, according to Taylor Dolezal, head of ecosystem at the CNCF. During the conference, there were a number of themes emerging, including AI.

“Lots of other threads and features and things within the ecosystem, but I think those are the top three … AI, security, platform engineering,” he said. “A little bit of developer experience overall encompassing a lot of that too, which I love because that’s kind of like the culture of code.”

As Dolezal mentioned, security emerged as a top trend during the conference. With that in mind, the CNCF and the Open Source Security Foundation discussed a number of new security initiatives they have adopted, including the OpenSSF Scorecard, which provides a security scorecard of one’s GitHub repository, according to Arun Gupta, vice president and general manager of open ecosystem strategy at Intel Corp. and governing chair of CNCF and OpenSSF.

“You can run it as a GitHub action [or] as a [command line interface action], and it’ll give you a score in the range of zero to 10,” Gupta told theCUBE during the event. “It goes through multiple elements — do you have branch protection? Are you putting secrets in your repo? Things like that.”

With all this innovation in mind, it’s also important to ensure that inclusivity in tech is paid close attention to. That’s where the CNCF’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group hopes to ensure an inclusive IT industry, according to Rob Koch, principal, data engineering at Slalom Inc. and co-chair of the CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group.

“We thought, why not maybe include and make things more inclusive and friendly to folks like us?” Koch said. “We have a deaf professional Slack group, and we had sent out different messages and asked who was on it. We asked [Destiny O’Connor, co-chair of the CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group] to join, asked me to join and a few other folks to join. There was a lot of enthusiasm behind that.”

Another area of debate during KubeCon was whether or not the laptop might soon replace the cloud as the preferred development environment for enterprise coders. Such an idea was brought forward by software engineer and developer advocate Kelsey Hightower in a post that has racked up nearly 700,000 views to date.

“I said if hardware continues at this trajectory, remote dev environments are going to be less appealing to developers. I want that fancy database on my desktop where I’m actually writing my code,” Hightower said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Taylor Dolezal:

3. Partnerships remain an important priority.

At a conference that emphasizes ecosystem and collaboration, it’s no surprise that partnerships remain an area of key focus. One of those involves Red Hat Inc. and Dell Technologies Inc., which are seeking to make AI more accessible to all.

“Linux has made its place in the marketplace, and Kubernetes and OpenShift are really powering the next generation of application deployments that we’re seeing out there,” said Ian Pilcher, senior principal product manager at Red Hat.

Red Hat also showcased its Backstage platform at KubeCon, a portal that aims to integrate developer tools, documentation and templates, with the goal of innovating developer efficiency. Developers today are facing a complex web of resources, something the portal aims to alleviate.

“You need to put two things together. One is the developer productivity. That is a hot topic right now,” Ignacio Riesgo Pablo, senior director of developer marketing and strategy at Red Hat, told theCUBE. “We have one number that is 76% of developers struggle with the cognitive load. There [is] so much documentation, so many templates, so many things that they need to learn about. What are the right tools, the right people to connect?”

Google LLC also made an announcement at the conference, stating that GKE Enterprise, its managed Kubernetes service, would soon be generally available. It represented the “new evolution for Kubernetes,” according to Bobby Allen, cloud therapist at Google.

“This is about what I call having the right kind of CaaS, containers-as-a-service not confusion-as-a-service. Let’s make sure we are adding the right kind of features that customers need without unnecessary complexity. That’s really what this is about,” Allen said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ian Pilcher and Michael Wells Jr., engineering technologist at Dell:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

And make sure to catch our Savvy’s Swag showcase segments to see some of the conference floor swag found at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2023:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA. Neither Red Hat and CNCF, the main sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE