History has a tendency to repeat itself. This is because bad habits and anti-patterns are hard to break. And this remains the case with the latest sought-after engineering unicorn––the “Kubernetes expert”. These days, there is a veritable gold rush to hire the best and brightest Kubernetes wizards. Like all forms of expertise––this gold is rare, and as a result––is also costly. But this isn’t a new phenomenon in the technology world.

This year’s KubeCon was a whirlwind of insights and innovations. It’s always exhilarating to see how far we’ve come and where Kubernetes is taking us next. So, let’s unpack the top trends that are setting the stage for the next wave of developments in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Financial institutions face unprecedented challenges in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. The demand for agile, scalable, and resilient systems is at an all-time high, driven by a diverse and dynamic customer base that expects real-time, reliable services. This is where Kubernetes, a leading open-source container orchestration platform, emerges as a pivotal solution. Kubernetes has revolutionized software development and deployment.

AI has had a massive impact on every part of our lives, but mainly on how we consume large data sets easily. The observability world is based on collecting enormous amounts of data and consuming it by observing dashboards built on monitoring tools. Most of the o11y tasks like writing complex queries, creating dashboards & defining alerts, have been done much in the same way for the last decade & AI models are well-positioned to disrupt this modus operandi.

Backstage is gaining wide adoption for platform engineering teams looking to build internal development platforms. After implementing Backstage, data has shown an improvement in 2X of code changes, and a decrease of 17% in cycle time making a huge impact on the business delivery pipeline for organizations. Backstage with its rich plugin ecosystem, makes it possible to get full troubleshooting and security coverage you need across your entire pipeline in a single dashboard and interface.

The need for automation is becoming more important day by day. The process of integrating written code with already working code and publishing new code to live environments is a very error-prone process. Performing static analysis, running tests, packaging, and versioning are tasks that require a lot of manual effort. It’s also a complex task to solve the problem of deploying the projects we develop to more than one environment, on more than one machine, without automation.

As with any distributed system, networking plays a fundamental role in Kubernetes. Whether it’s allowing containers on different nodes to communicate, exposing services to external clients, or managing the flow of data between pods, Kubernetes networking is at the heart of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Understanding this system is the key to keeping your deployments running smoothly.

Configuration as code (CaC), a practice that involves setting up operating systems and software through configuration files, has quickly become an essential concept for software developers and DevOps teams. The key reason for this is that CaC integrates seamlessly with CI/CD and version control pipelines, a game-changing benefit discussed in this article.

We at Komodor are excited to announce our groundbreaking integration with Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO). This collaboration marks a significant milestone in Kubernetes Continuous Reliability, bringing together the best of both worlds to redefine Kubernetes management.

An elite DevOps team from Komodor takes on the Klustered challenge; can they fix a maliciously broken Kubernetes cluster using only the Komodor platform? Let’s find out! Watch Komodor’s Co-Founding CTO, Itiel Shwartz, and two engineers – Guy Menahem and Nir Shtein leverage the Continuous Kubernetes Reliability Platform that they’ve built to showcase how fast, effortless, and even fun, troubleshooting can be!