KubeCon EU 2023 Retrospective

I was super excited and proud to be at KubeCon Amsterdam with the Komodor team and wanted to capture my experience while it’s still fresh in my head, so here goes. 

A huge chunk of my time is spent on conversations with our customers, partners, investors, other founders, and Kubernetes practitioners of all levels – discussing their pains, industry trends, etc. 

But being on the ground at KubeCon and engaging with the wider Kubernetes community in-person just hits different. You can literally feel the energy of thousands of diverse, enthusiastic people coming together to celebrate their passion for K8s and the future of software. 

We’ve come so far since our first (virtual only) KubeCon…

When my partner, Itiel Schwartz, and I founded Komodor over 2 years ago, the cloud-native world was still debating whether Kubernetes will take over the market. Komodor has grown in tandem with K8s, and now we all know that K8s adoption is no longer a choice (Resistance is futile! As the Borg say), the real question today is not ‘if’ but ‘how’ – How to truly unleash the power of Kubernetes? 

When I look at the tagline on our booth – “Kubernetes For Humans”, everything comes back to me full circle. Technology has evolved faster than humans, and while the world of software delivery is changing before our very eyes, we, the mere mortals, struggle to catch up.

This in my mind is the secret to Komodor’s success – not only that we understand K8s, but the fact that we understand the people behind the machine. Platform Engineers, DevOps, SREs, and devs all have different responsibilities and KPIs, but they have 2 things in common – they’re all human, and they all have a mutual goal which is to deliver reliable, quality software, fast!

By keeping the human factor top of mind when building Komodor we were able to create a unified platform that brings together all the humans that form the SDLC into a single place where they can all speak the same language and collaborate. A platform that enables any dev to understand, visualize, manage, and troubleshoot their K8s apps end-to-end! 

This is how you unleash the power of Kubernetes! Stop looking at humans as barriers or bottlenecks. By empowering developers and elevating the K8s experience we’re not looking at them as the problem, but rather as part of the solution.

This is really disruptive to the status quo and feels like the next phase in the evolution of engineering, where we’re not playing catchup with technology but owning it instead. Where every engineer has K8s superpowers. Where we can all fulfill our full potential and become something new… maybe Kubo-Sapiens? 🤔

Pictured below: Itiel & I on Komodor’s very first day (circa 2020)  VS. us in front of a packed booth at KubeCon (2023)