Kubernetes continues to gain steam in enterprises, and for good reason: It tames the complexity that arises as you begin to use containers at scale. It automates and orchestrates Linux container operations, eliminating many manual tasks involved in deploying and scaling containerized applications.
Where is Kubernetes headed next? I got a good look at last week’s KubeCon conference in Copenhagen. Consider these three trends:
1. Continuous integration is key
Continuous integration was the central topic of the opening keynote by Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The fact that he used his high-profile airtime to highlight what is usually thought of as “just” a development technology is telling.
His context: Code quality remains relatively poor overall. One fix is highly automated testing and quality checks throughout the development pipeline. This includes both unit and integration testing as well as scans for security vulnerabilities. (See our related story: DevOps success: Why continuous is a key word.)
Test cases are also a great way for new contributors to get involved with an open source project, as Heather Kirsey, who heads Community and Ecosystem for the Linux Foundation OPNFV told me in an interview at the event. “We don’t need any more help with testing or documentation,” said no community manager ever.
If anything, I’d argue that continuous integration is too narrow a framing, in that it focuses specifically on the developer pipeline. In fact, the software supply chain also needs to be secured. Where did that container come from? And instances that have passed into production also need to be monitored for failures and to determine if any newly discovered vulnerabilities are relevant to them.