Cloud-Native: It’s One Thing

This Wednesday, August 10, 2022, starting at 9:00 a.m. ET, Techstrong Group is hosting an awesome virtual conference: CloudNativeDay. I am sure most of you already know a lot about the many cloud-native solutions out there; are familiar with the great work the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) does and that you have Kubernetes clusters running in your environments. But for me, at first, the interest and enthusiasm people showed for anything and everything cloud-native defied my understanding.

We do about one virtual conference a month here at Techstrong Group. That may sound like a lot, but when you divide it up among topics in DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud-native and digital transformation and then further segment who in an organization is targeted by those events, it doesn’t give us a lot of room to dive as deeply into some topics as we would like. We pick the topics of our virtual events carefully and we depend on feedback from you, our audience, to guide us.

This is the fourth year we are producing a cloud-native virtual event, so the topic has obviously resonated with many of you. But it wasn’t until this past year that I had the “Eureka!” moment and realized why.  You see, to discover the reason why cloud-native was so popular, I looked in the usual spots: Software, applications and solutions. I felt confident that Kubernetes’ popularity was one of the reasons cloud-native was so popular. Over the last 24 months, observability burst on the scene. Maybe that was driving the continued popularity of cloud-native. Heck, the CNCF has over 40 projects; perhaps the sheer quantity is what makes cloud-native so popular. But none of that felt exactly right—yes, all of these things drive cloud-native’s popularity. But they aren’t the key driver.

Once again this year, I had the pleasure of recording a fireside chat with Tim Hockin. If you don’t know him, Tim is a principal software engineer at Google and an original member of the team that brought Kubernetes out from Borg (if you don’t know Borg, then you need to learn some cloud-native history). This is the fourth year we have Tim keynoting this virtual conference, and chatting with him is always a highlight of the event for me.

Tim said something in our conversation this year that finally made it click for me. Suddenly, I had found it. The “one thing”, in the immortal words of Curly from the movie City Slickers.

You see, the secret to cloud-native isn’t how great and powerful Kubernetes is; it’s not what observability or service mesh or any of those great cloud-native or CNCF-developed software tools can do for you. Cloud-native is a state of mind. As much as it is about software, it is also a state of mind. Cloud-native is about building powerful, applications at scale using the entire ecosystem that was created as a result of that state of mind.

Sound a little too zen for you? Well, I hope to change that thinking. You do not want to miss my conversation with Tim Hockin that kicks off our show this year. We’ll discuss the belief and help you understand why cloud-native is a state of mind. And, while you’re listening, Tim and I also talk about what is new in fleet and multi-cluster Kubernetes.

The entire virtual event program is chock full of great sessions. Head over to the event site and see for yourself. Panel discussions, speakers, demos. Great exhibitor booths you can visit and ask questions. Games, prizes, a DJ, a mixologist and more. We can’t wait to see you there!

And if you remember anything from the event, let it be this one thing: Cloud-native is a state of mind.