KubeCon 2022 Recap

2022 was my first in-person KubeCon since 2019. This was a bit thinly attended, probably due to location. I did not attend the sessions but spent some time on the floor talking to the expo companies

• KubeCon is also becoming a proxy for developer startups and there were a ton of supply chain security, CI/CD, WASM, etc. companies
• I have chosen only Kubernetes/container native companies in the below market map. I might be missing a few

• Some categories interest me and some don't. I can be wrong, but I try to explain below

1. Networking: This is my least favourite category. Container networking is a foundational technology and best served open source. Service mesh, CNI, eBPF are open source and startups are adding "enterprise features" or selling "support" for open source. To add to the confusion there are 4 service meshes - Istio, Envoy, Buoyant, Consul. We should agree on one and move on. The higher level applications are 1) Security/ network policy (zero-trust, micro-segmentation, identity based policy) 2) Networking (routing, load balancing, API gateway) 3) Observability (agentless telemetry, networking monitoring. Customers want a full stack solution (app, infra, network), providing telemetry limited to networking will only help few large customers. If you sell security it is a small component of the broader CWPP. Networking in itself cannot be monetised

Security/Governance: This is a useful but similar to my argument in #1, this is a component of the broader CWPP, CSPM category. Hard to survive standalone just focused on container/k8s

1. K8s Control Plane startups: I will cover this in a separate article, but this category amazes me. So many vendors as the barrier to entry is so low (configuring yaml files). The use cases are 1) Internal developer platforms 2) environments. Rationale here is k8s is hard to learn and configure for developers. Most customers can do with managed k8s services or hosted CI/CD services if developers want deployment options. The environments (test, staging, release) is a real use case but imho it needs to align/combine with production.
2. Integration/Test: This category truly extends the Docker container building ecosystem into testing, integration. These are mostly packaging/configuring plays like Docker but improves developer productivity. The best GTM though is thru Docker as it has scale.
3. Other: In this category you have workload/cluster management, cost management, day 2 operations, CI/CD. This category competes with the multi-cloud k8s based solutions from incumbents such as Google Anthos, RedHat Open Shift, VMware Tanzu. There is a market for these solutions in few verticals such as Telcos or edge use cases. K8S does not manage utilisation very well so the cost management solutions are handy, but combined with management (moving/packing workloads, downsizing/upsizing/disabling clusters) leads to an optimal solution
4. Observability: I remain bullish on this category. Fast forward if most workloads move to containers/k8s and cloud, a purpose built observability solution can be a standalone company. Building on top of Prometheus is lazy. Though incumbents such as DataDog, Splunk has good container/k8s coverage, a purpose built solution with SRE+incident management+automation built in can win the market. The key to winning is to make operations much more efficient (high availability, fewer incidents, faster incident response) than incumbents. Though k8s usage in production still lags, we can see a flywheel effect that better observability solutions accelerates k8s adoption. Once that flywheel starts going, we will see a big company emerge in this space. Not there yet, but has potential. Here is Komodor (not an investor) 's product