Is navigating cloud-native complexity worth the hassle?

Last month 7,000 developers traveled to Valencia to attend the combined KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 conference, the event for Kubernetes and cloud-native software development. A further 10,000 developers joined the conference online. The event is organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. The CNCF supports and promotes over 1,200 projects, products and companies associated with developing and facilitating innovative cloud-native practices. All CNCF projects are open source – free and accessible to all – and its members work together to create scalable and adaptable applications.

The tools and services discussed at the event aim to solve the technical complexity of cloud-native practices, but there is a new complexity in the vast choice of tools and services now available. Organizations face a difficult choice when choosing which projects and products will best meet their needs and then designing an application using these tools to meet large-scale requirements. A fuller explanation of cloud-native principles is available in the Uptime Institute report Cloud scalability and resiliency from first principles.