By Jason McGee, Fellow, IBM
Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, is VP and CTO of Container and Microservice Tribe. Jason leads the technical strategy and architecture across all of IBM Cloud, with specific focus on core foundational cloud services, including containers, microservices, continuous delivery and operational visibility services.
Kubernetes is nothing new, we’ve been talking about how it has changed the developer space for a few years now. However, the world of managed containerized workloads and services has hit a new milestone: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced the graduation of Kubernetes from its incubation program.
As we look forward to its future, I sat down with Chris Aniszczyk, COO of CNCF, to discuss the growth of Kubernetes, expectations for 2018, developer training and certification, serverless architecture, ML/AI, and how cloud providers can enhance the container space.
We agree — it’s good news for developers that Kubernetes has become mainstream, even though the enterprise and large-scale adoption of the technology is seen by some as boring or losing excitement. Boring isn’t necessarily bad. With K8s certifications, like CKA, training programs and best practices in place, Kubernetes has grown to a point of adoption outside of the bubble of container orchestration enthusiasts into the wider world of developers; especially those who might not have the technical bandwidth to spare to learn the intricacies of a new technology. Since we’ve focused on making the platform as solid as possible, rapid adoption has occurred through the training provided to swiftly gain the right skills and expertise. And we only expect further maturation of this technology that will radically transform how we build software over next 5 years.
The new Certified Kubernetes Application Developer program gives a developer everything he or she needs to integrate Kubernetes into a tech stack. Coupled with the increased availability of managed services offered by KCSP partners like IBM and other cloud vendors, this creates a bright future for Kubernetes. We expect to see exciting advances for the next generations of the cutting-edge solution, like container orchestration with Kubernetes unlocking the possibility of enhancing microservice architectures with management solutions like The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced the graduation of Kubernetes from its incubation program, or finding new use cases leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Moral of the story — there is still much for developers to be excited about in the containers and microservices space. For our full conversation about Kubernetes and Istio, helping DevOps learn about these new technologies, where serverless architecture fits into the picture, and how ML/AI driven infrastructures could be the next frontier, listen to the full episode of the New Builders Podcast.
For more information, consider going to Jason’s panel on microservices and containers at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, May 2-4, 2018 in Copenhagen.