Some thoughts from this year's #kubecon now that I am back in ☁️ city and have decompressed a bit. (Thread)
The stable of CNCF technologies is maturing, but they are still primarily building blocks. End users are struggling to figure how to put them together in useful ways, and often end up inheriting complexity they don't need.
The vendor ecosystem is not helping decrease complexity; quite the opposite. The fierce competition, FUD, and sometimes rancor is confusing end users. CNCF is not helping either; the official landscape is so large and confusing as to be useless. We need to do better.
On the positive side, there are real genuine success stories of large and sophisticated organizations deploying CNCF technology and this is great to see and hear about.
How do we allow this success to "trickle down" to smaller organizations without both confusing them and saddling them with complexity they don't need to run their business? More education and case studies "from the trenches" to balance out glossy vendor brochures would help.
IMO the conference itself needs to evolve to better meet the needs of a very diverse set of attendees: new users, sophisticated users, vendors, project maintainers and collaborators, etc. I would much rather see a set of targeted collocated mini-conferences (i.e. expanded day 0).
On the topic of OSS politics, Google's shortsighted decision to neither donate Istio nor Knative to the CNCF is creating more angst than I would have thought. A forked "OpenIstio" seems a real possibility rather than a joke at this point. Time will tell.
Moving on to @EnvoyProxy, both #envoycon and the main conference meet the maintainers session were a pleasure. I ❤️ talking to users and it blows me away how much Envoy has been deployed; anecdotally I suspect large scale production use has outpaced K8s.
My decision to not start a company around Envoy early on feels more vindicated with each passing conference cycle; the vibrant community filled with genuine success stories would not have happened any other way.
I will close with the topic of OSS itself. There is incredible energy, passion, and 💰 around many CNCF technologies. Yet, maintainer burnout is a pervasive problem. In 2020 we need to figure out how to get end users more involved in maintenance and tackle burnout and overwork.
From my own conversations, many end users WANT to help, they just don't know how to get started, have corporate road blocks that hinder contribution, etc. CNCF can and should invest more resources on contributor onboarding as well as project services to unburden maintainers.
I had a great time in San Diego filled with lots of great conversations about technology. We have come a long way in the ☁️ native space and I'm excited for how much work there is still left to do. /fin
