Transparency
Report
Attendees Overview
Co-located Events
Content
End Users
Health & Safety
Media Coverage
What an amazing week in Detroit!
This KubeCon + CloudNativeCon #TeamCloudNative roared back. Detroit marked the first time we'd gathered in such big numbers in the Midwest, and the city did not disappoint! For many of us, we explored a new region, enjoyed some great food, and broke stereotypes with the renaissance of Detroit.
Project maintainers, who are the backbone of CNCF projects, were the focus and highlight at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America and rightly so. There are approximately 1,000 maintainers in the cloud native ecosystem catering to 175,000+ contributors and serving 7 million+ developers. Without maintainers, there is no ecosystem and it was an honor to support them with initiatives such as Security Slam and ContribFest that strengthened our security posture and brought more contributors to projects at the event.
One of my personal highlights was interviewing Heba Elayoty and Yuan Tang on the keynote stage. From them we learned what research has demonstrated time and again - maintainers' biggest ask is for their employers to support them in investing working hours on open source. Companies take note!
As always, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon was the place for big announcements in our industry. AWS for instance shared their commitment to supporting the Kubernetes project with cloud credits and engineering resources as the project goes on its own multi-cloud journey.
There is much to unpack from this phenomenal event and I've really enjoyed looking back as we put this transparency report together for you. I hope you find the information valuable and look forward to seeing you next April in Amsterdam for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe!
Priyanka Sharma
Executive Director, CNCF
First-time attendees
CFPs submitted
Pieces of media coverage
Scholarship recipients thanks to Dan Kohn Scholarship Fund
ATTENDEE
OVERVIEW
This year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Detroit was our first time hosting #TeamCloudNative's flagship event in the Midwest, and we were thrilled to see so many of you there.
It's no surprise that our US community accounted for the largest number of attendees, but it was wonderful to see so many folx coming from Canada and Israel to join us in person, and from as far afield as India and even New Zealand to be with us both in person and virtually.
Demographics
Attendee Geography
To me, the beating heart of cloud native security is most definitely KubeCon.
Fernando Montenegro
Top Countries in attendance
Total
10,568
1,739
748
In-person
5,744
291
184
Virtual
4,824
1,664
457
Top Three Job Functions of attendees
DevOps / SRE / Sysadmin
4,557Developer
3,378Architect
2,777| Attendee Job Function | Total |
|---|---|
| Architect | 2,777 |
| Business Operations | 283 |
| Developer | 3,378 |
| - Data Scientist | 156 |
| - Full Stack Developer | 2,648 |
| - Machine Learning Specialist | 104 |
| - Web Developer | 422 |
| - Mobile Developer | 58 |
| DevOps / SRE / SysAdmin | 4,557 |
| Executive | 865 |
| IT Operations | 456 |
| - DevOps | 179 |
| - Systems Admin | 190 |
| - Site Reliability Engineer | 67 |
| - Quality Assurance Engineer | 20 |
| Sales / Marketing | 1,654 |
| Media / Analyst | 142 |
| Student | 872 |
| Professor / Academic | 46 |
| Other | 1,359 |
| Attendee Industry | Total |
|---|---|
| Automotive | 330 |
| Consumer Goods | 512 |
| Energy | 147 |
| Financials | 1,668 |
| Health Care | 411 |
| Industrials | 254 |
| Information Technology | 11,724 |
| Materials | 66 |
| Non-Profit Organization | 393 |
| Professional Services | 727 |
| Telecommunications | 541 |
Year on Year Growth - North American Events
From KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021 in Los Angeles to the event in Detroit, we saw a 110% increase in in-person attendees.
| Ticket Type | 2016 Seattle | 2017 Austin | 2018 Seattle | 2019 San Diego | 2020 Virtual | 2021 Los Angeles | 2022 Detroit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 1,139 | 4,212 | 8,000 | 11,981 | 22,816 | 23,164 | 16,986 |
| In-person Corporate | 38% | 64% | 68% | 67% | N/A | 5% | 17% |
| In-person Individual | 23% | 7% | 6% | 9% | N/A | 1% | 4% |
| Virtual All Access Pass | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | 67.34% | 68% | 48% |
| Virtual Keynote + Solutions Showcase Only | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | 13.97% | 18% | 4.5% |
| Speaker | 11% | 6% | 5% | 5% | 1.51% | 1% | 3% |
| Sponsor | 17% | 16% | 17% | 15% | 16.55% | 7% | 21.5% |
| Media | 3% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 0.63% | <1% | 1% |
| Academic | N/A | 2% | 2% | 3% | N/A | <1% | 1% |
Diversity, Equity & Inclusivity
CNCF strives to ensure that everyone who participates in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon feels welcome, regardless of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, race, ethnicity, age, religion, or economic status. Just over 12% of attendees identified as a person of color, and more than 50% preferred not to answer. As part of our deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusivity, we hosted a number of workshops and networking opportunities to help connect individuals to opportunities within tech.
Gold CHAOSS D&I Event Badge
Awarded to events in the open source community that foster healthy D&I practices
| Diversity, Equity & Inclusivity Events and Mentoring | Total |
|---|---|
| Diversity Lunch participants | 12 |
| Allyship Workshop participants | 16 |
| EmpowerUs participants | 35 |
| Peer Group Mentoring + Career Networking mentors - in-person | 10 |
| Peer Group Mentoring + Career Networking mentees - in-person | 50 |
| Peer Group Mentoring + Career Networking mentors - virtual | 3 |
| Peer Group Mentoring + Career Networking mentees - virtual | 28 |
Our next Kubecon + CloudNativeCon
Co-Located
Events
Co-located events feature industry experts covering topics like security, web assembly, AI, GitOps, edge, and more.
The list of co-located events at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon has been steadily growing for the past few years, so much that we are now spinning off the highly successful CloudNativeSecurityCon into a stand-alone event.
CNCF-Hosted Co-Located Events Attendance
| BackstageCon | 187 |
| CloudNativeSecurityCon | 228 |
| Cloud Native eBPF Day | 84 |
| Cloud Native Telco Day | 72 |
| Cloud Native Wasm Day | 115 |
| EnvoyCon | 92 |
| GitOpsCon | 191 |
| KnativeCon | 100 |
| Kubernetes AI Day | 152 |
| Kubernetes Batch + HPC Day | 81 |
| Kubernetes on Edge Day | 112 |
| Open Observability Day | 161 |
| PrometheusDay | 103 |
| ServiceMeshCon | 165 |
| SigstoreCon | 82 |
CO-LOCATED EVENT REPORTS
Co-located events feature industry experts covering topics like security, web assembly, AI, GitOps, edge, and more.
Content
Thankfully this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America did something a little different. It still had a lot of the newest, shiniest technologies as well as plenty of discussions for elite DevOps organizations. But the schedule was also packed with a 101 track and welcomes to many Special Interest Groups (SIGs). It also gave a lot of advice on how to support these highly distributed, often voluntary communities.
Jennifer Riggins
We enjoyed 266 sessions in Detroit, including 90 maintainer sessions.
| Sessions | Total | In-Person | Virtual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keynotes (includes sponsored keynotes) | 18 | 16 | 3 |
| Total sessions (CFP & Maintainer) | 266 | 233 | 33 |
| - Breakouts | 176 | 154 | 22 |
| - Maintainer sessions | 90 | 79 | 11 |
Thank you to our fabulous KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 co-chairs
Ricardo RochaCERN
Computing Engineer
Emily FoxApple
Security Engineer
Frederick KautzComputing Engineer Infra &
Security Enterprise Architect
Manager
Content
Breakdown
The schedule was curated by conference co-chairs, Richardo Rocha of CERN, Emily Fox of Apple, and Frederick Kautz of Doc.ai, who led a program committee of 93 experts and 34 track chairs, including project maintainers, active community members, and highly rated presenters from past events.
Talks are selected by the program committee through a rigorous, non-bias process, where they are randomly assigned submissions to review within their area of expertise. You can read the details in our CFP scoring guidelines, and specifically about the North America selection process.
Key Stats
CFP Submissions
Speakers
First-time Speakers
Speaker Diversity
CNCF enforces guidelines on gender and diversity equality among our speakers, including not accepting all-male panels.
| Diversity | Overall | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Speakers - men (keynotes) | 10 | 56% |
| Speakers - women + gender non-conforming (keynotes) | 8 | 44% |
| Speakers - men (breakouts) | 217 | 78% |
| Speakers - women (breakouts) | 58 | 21% |
| Speakers - gender non-conforming (breakouts) | 2 | 1% |
End
Users
End users are an important part of #TeamCloudNative and played a significant role in Detroit by driving new initiatives and sharing valuable experiences in presentations.
Key Stats
Additional end user data
is on the way
CTO SUMMIT
The CTO Summit gathered a tight-knit group of technology leaders from some of cloud native's biggest end users to discuss what maturity means in the cloud native world. Focusing on the intersection between provisioning and the Cloud Native Maturity Model, leaders openly discussed the challenges, cultural shifts, and technical solutions they've seen on their journey to improve the maturity and resiliency of their cloud native infrastructure.
CTO Summit attendees
Thanks to our CTO Summit Dinner Sponsor
We started this CTO Summit where end users, like Fidelity and Intuit, and many others can come together and have a private conversation, in a secure space, about how they are handling challenges in their organizations. We all have each other to learn from.
Priyank Sharma
Executive Director, CNCF
End User Presentations
More than one third of talks at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America were from end users who shared insightful and valuable stories from across the stack.
Watch all talks on our YouTube playlist.
The Next Generation
More than 3,400 people joined us for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America thanks to the Dan Kohn Scholarship Fund, including diversity, need-based, and student scholarship opportunities.
| Scholarships | Total | In-Person | Virtual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diversity scholarships | 395 | 73 | 322 |
| Need-based scholarships | 507 | 24 | 483 |
| Student scholarships | 2606 | N/A | 2606 |
Sponsored by
Security Slam
This year we partnered with Sonatype to host the first ever Security Slam virtual event on November 21, 2022. Thirteen projects participated, leveraging existing CNCF tools to increase their open source security posture, awareness, and compliance. Google donated $27,500 to the Dan Kohn Scholarship Fund in the name of the projects that made it to 100% security.
Projects That Made It To 100%
Projects Participating
Projects successfully made it to 100% security within their CLOmonitoring scorecard
Donated by Google to the Dan Kohn Scholarship Fund
On Sunday, October 23, we hosted our first complimentary Kid's Day in Detroit. Featuring two workshops:
- Minecraft Modding
- Gotta Catch 'em All! Raspberry Pi And Java Pokemon Training
We'll host Kid's Day again at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam this coming April, for all children (ages 8-14) who are interested in technology, coding, and STEAM fields.
Health & Safety
We care deeply about our community. This is why we want to be honest and open about our COVID-19 policies at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the measures that were put in place, and how these may have affected the attendee experience.
Kubecon + Cloudnativecon implemented
the following safety precautions:
or negative test Proof required for in-person attendees
Masks Required usage of masks indoors
testing Complimentary onsite COVID testing
indicators Social distance comfort levels
COVID Numbers
Over the two weeks immediately after KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
(October 31 - November 11), we were made aware of:
Positive Tests from
in-person attendees
Of In-Person Attendees Tested
Positive Overall
Serious Cases Reported
This information was compiled from:
- Those who contacted us to let us know of a positive test
- Records from our onsite testing company
- Scanning Twitter for additional publicized cases
Incident Transparency Report
Code of Conduct report received on-site (involving an offsite incident and security response)
Attendee taken to the hospital (after a scooter accident)
Sustainability
We're committed to sustainability at our events and this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon was no exception.
The venue, Huntington Place, is also committed to environmental stewardship in the community and makes continuous efforts to investigate, validate and implement new and innovative Green initiatives throughout the facility.
You can read their extensive sustainability initiatives, including:
- CNCF and sponsor companies donated left-over conference swag, office supplies, furniture and more to local organizations for reuse and upcycling.
- Huntington Place is a LEED Gold Certified Facility.
- Housekeeping staff use products that are environmentally safe and non-toxic.
- All pallets are recycled to a local area vendor.
- Food that has not been served is donated to Forgotten Harvest, a local Detroit company that delivers the food to pantries, soup kitchens and shelters throughout Southeastern Michigan.
- Conference lanyards were made from recycled water bottles.
Media & Analyst
Coverage
The event itself, as always, was fantastic with lots of good information. If you are involved with K8s or cloud-native computing, KubeCon continues to be THE EVENT that you should attend.
Tom Fenton
Key stats
More Media Coverage
than last year Compared with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 (Los Angeles and virtual)
Mentions Of Kubecon
+ Cloudnativecon In media articles, press releases, and blogs
Online Reach + Traffic
Clicks on Twitter
Likes on Twitter
Retweets
Media + Analyst Results
"CNCF" mentions in media articles, press releases, and blogs that were shared 1,113 times on Twitter.
"Kubernetes" mentions in media articles, press releases, and blogs that were shared 952 times across social platforms.
"KubeCon + CloudNativeCon" mentions in media articles, press releases, and blogs that were shared 1,290 times across social platforms.
Coverage Overview
153 media and industry analysts attended both in person and virtually. The CNCF PR and AR team hosted two media and analyst roundtables at the event focusing on developer experience, and what's next in cloud native, in addition to an end user panel at the press and analyst conference.
These inspiring panel conversations lead to a number of interesting deep dives from TechTarget on the end user panel, and two articles from the "What's next in cloud native" panel: Computing and SDxCentral. In addition, the stand-alone analyst event featured a maintainer panel, which resulted in analyst blog coverage of top trends including FinOps, Wasm and cloud native security.
Quote Highlights
The big story was security; the software supply chain was the number one consistent theme. The growth of open source exposes potential vulnerabilities with security, so software supply chain gets my vote.
John Furrier
SiliconANGLE
One common theme across the event was that the economy is top of mind for vendors and organizations. Cost control and management is a major focus.
Paul Nashawaty
TechTarget
If there was one big takeaway this year, it would be the re-emergence of the platform paradigm in cloud-native clothing.
Jason English
SiliconANGLE
The roughly 1,000 maintainers in the CNCF community make decisions that affect and support more than 7 million cloud-native developers globally. “If you really think about it, it's 1,000 people supporting millions. Maintainers are holding up the cloud-native ecosystem,” [Sharma] said.
Emma Chervek
SDxCentral
Another topic was ease of use to reduce complexity, as well as the need to hire highly skilled staff to meet business KPIs. Organizations are turning to vendors to provide fewer, more consolidated products that reduce complexity and to act as trusted advisors.
Paul Nashawaty
TechTarget
Coverage Highlights
Over 3,833 articles published from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in leading outlets (as of November 10).
Computing - Why enterprises must do more to support open source software they use
Dark Reading - Cloud-Native Security Was in the Air at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2022
Datanami - Kubernetes Goes Big and Small at KubeCon
DevOps.com - CNCF Survey Predicts Growing Wasm Momentum
ERP Today - Hello caller, CNCF cloud-native network function certification engages
Evaluator Group - KubeCon 2022: From DevOps to PlatformOps
Forrester - WebAssembly (Wasm) Will Be Big — Early News From KubeCon 2022
SD Times - KubeCon Keynote stresses the importance of supporting maintainers and upstream commitments
SDX Central - Open Source Maintainers Key to Healthy Cloud-Native Ecosystem
SiliconANGLE - Continued rapid adoption of Kubernetes hints at a historic KubeCon event
SiliconANGLE - Ford Motor's early experience with cloud-native smoothed the road for its digital transformation
TechTarget - Platform engineers plug abstraction leaks
The New Stack - Meet SIG Cluster Lifecycle and Cluster API Maintainers at KubeCon
The New Stack - Ukraine Has a Bright Future
InfoQ - Developer Tooling for Cloud-Native Wasm Is Going Mainstream
Industry Analyst Coverage Highlights
This show is about developers; it's not a business show; it's not about industry posturing or marketing. This show is about creating products for builders and creating products that people can consume. The community isn't just vendors, and that's the interesting thing.
John Furrier
| Torsten Volk, ESG | KubeCon 2022: 3 Product Highlights |
| Carlos Casanova, Forrester | Introducing The Forrester Observability Reference Architecture |
| Jim Mercer, IDC | IDC PlanScape: DevSecOps Adoption for Digital Innovators |
| Beth Pariseau, Tech Target | Platform engineers plug abstraction leaks |
| Pete Townsend, Principal CTO Advisor | Analysts lay out new technologies to solve enterprise needs at KubeCon NA Day 2 |
| Nancy Gohring, IDC | IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Developer and DevOps 2023 Predictions |
| Charlie Dai, Lee Sustar, Forrester | Navigate The Cloud-Native Ecosystem In 2022 |
| Fernando Montenegro, Omdia | Cloud-Native Security Was in the Air at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2022 |
| Charlotte Dunlap, GlobalData | KubeCon 2022: Key Trends Include WebAssembly, FinOps, and Security |
| Greg Zwakman, Jay Lyman, 451 Research | Application Container Ecosystem Market Monitor: Application Container Ecosystem Data File |
Sponsor
Information
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon would not be possible without the support of our wonderful sponsors.
| Booth Traffic | Total |
|---|---|
| Onsite leads total | 73,026 |
| Onsite leads average/booth | 252 |
| Virtual leads total | 33,427 |
| Virtual leads average/booth | 140 |
| YOY SPONSORSHIP | 2016 Seattle | 2017 Austin | 2018 Seattle | 2019 San Diego | 2020 Virtual | 2021 Los Angeles | 2022 Detroit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond | 8 | 5 | 6* | 6* | 6* | 6* | 6* |
| Platinum | 3 | 17 | 20 | 35 | 8 | 20 | 28 |
| Gold | 10 | 23 | 20 | 19 | 21 | 26 | 32 |
| Silver | 13 | 30 | 87 | 100 | 63 | 91 | 135 |
| Start-up | N/A | 30 | 50 | 73 | 38 | 76 | 94 |
| End User | N/A | N/A | 5 | 10 | 2 | 7 | 6 |
| Marketing Opportunities | 13 | 26 | 27 | 34 | 29 | 35 | 65 |
| Total Unique | 39 | 107 | 193 | 246 | 143 | 228 | 303 |
Diamond Sponsors
Platinum Sponsors
Video Highlights
Thank You
We hope you enjoyed reflecting on a great event in Detroit - let's do it again in Amsterdam!
Your comments and feedback are welcome at events@cncf.io
Check out our calendar for community events near you and don't forget to register for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam, April 2023.
