Guest: Rob Hirschfeld (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: RackN (Twitter)

In this episode of Let’s Talk, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Detroit, I sat down with Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder of RackN, to talk about some of the major developments within the Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystem and how much of that was reflected at the event.

Kubernetes has entrenched itself as the dominant enterprise platform for container management. It has this enormous number of projects and a large ecosystem with all these other pieces. There are more vendors and sponsors at this event than there were attendees at the first event. Hirschfeld thinks that is a challenge.

After talking to attendees, he found that a lot of people are still in the discovery, migration or initial deployment phase. While it is definitely a component of how the systems are being built, we are not hitting Day 2, the scale of the operations pieces, to the same extent that we need to.

The complexity of Kubernetes remains a big challenge. Hirschfeld feels this is the last “easy” Kubernetes conference. There are certainly users showing their production workloads, but enterprise challenges are yet to be seen. The enterprise users are here, the enterprise opportunity is here, but the enterprise challenges of running them in production haven’t yet shown up and you don’t see talks about that as much yet.

Hirschfeld also noticed that customer resource definition (CRD)  was a dominant topic at the event, which was a great thing.

He didn’t see much discussion around platform engineering, which many hail as the next evolution of DevOps and is going to be a lot more than just Kubernetes.

Check out the in-depth discussion in the video above.