CNCF recently released its 2020 report that reflects on the explosive growth and adoption of cloud native technologies hosted by the foundation. According to the report, “Throughout its fifth year, CNCF achieved tremendous community engagement through steady membership growth, incredible virtual event attendance, strong end-user participation, and broad industry commentary. At present, CNCF hosts 80+ projects with over 110,000 contributors from nearly 1,000 organizations representing 177 countries.”

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Founder of RackN, joined me to analyze the latest CNCF report. Here are some of the topics that we covered.

• What progress the CNCF committee and you have seen through 2020 that reflects in this report?
• CNCF landscape continues to grow, at the same time we have started to see some consolidation. Does the report match with what you see happening within the ecosystem?
• If you were to write the report, how different would it have been from this report?
• Let’s talk about the edge. Kubernetes is also being used at the edge. So when you do talk about this kind of heavy and complex technology like Kubernetes, is it too heavy for the edge? There are a lot of distributions that are extremely light?
• The landscape looks really big. There are a lot of vendors too. But there are super big players and very small players. Despite it all being open source, there is vendor lock-in too. So despite being a crowded and busy space, is there real competition within the CNCF landscape that creates choices for users?
• What are some of the biggest challenges still there for cloud native technologies like Kubernetes?
• In the end, we talked about how RackN, a company that Hirschfeld founded to help users in their digital transformation journey, is helping cloud native users, especially in the context of what we learned from this report.

[su_note note_color=”#e4e4e4″ text_color=”#000″ class=”hvr-grow”] RackN automation brings control, consistency and choice to managing distributed infrastructures. The RackN Digital Rebar platform is The Distributed Infrastructure as Code Manager that creates a decentralized IaC automation and provisioning framework. Our product provides highly secure, vendor agnostic workflows that control tool sprawl by providing modular life-cycle automation from bare metal up to cloud. [/su_note]