How to survive the cloud native bubble

Aug 31, 2023

With the number of rising solutions, license changes and all the spaces getting cluttered, how as a creator of the project and as a founder you can stand apart with your solution is something I have been looking at and want to share some of my insights.

The CNCF Landscape is massive, why? Kubernetes being a beast also brought many challenges and to solve that a whole ecosystem with various branches got developed.

Example - After you install a Kubernetes cluster you would need security, observability, Chaos testing, Backup/restore and the list goes on. To solve each part of the puzzle their are different projects and then solutions built on top of that projects that are for enterprises.

When you are developing something new what all you should consider?

Market research - This has to be done in order to see in which space you will be competing in, who all are the Major players and who are the new players.
Understanding the shares - Usually there will be a few key players that will be holding the majority of the market and then some new players that will be innovating with new ways to solve the same problem. So understand in which bubble you are.
Problem - You should be very clear on the problem you are trying to solve. Either you are trying to rebuild a light weight version, or adding a topping to existing solution, completely rewriting it with new technology like WASM or ebpf, combining a few different tools in one, building complete platforms etc.
OSS, CE and BE - Everyone has to do business and earn money, the cloud native space is very very competitive when it comes to getting paying customers so from starting you should be clear in head how your revenue model will look like. OSS complete + support , OSS community edition and business edition, OSS + Managed SAAS and other such models can work.
Differentiators - Some people miss this but this actually proves to be very useful when you are trying out something new in the same space where 10 other tools are also present. How your tool is different? Since you would and should have done market research and you know the top used product in your tool’s space, you should then create comparisons on various points to showcase where your product is adding value for the user. Don’t over add and try to be as transparent as possible, like if your tool is lacking something then add it to coming soon or something similar.
Benchmarks - This also resonates with above point, once you have differentiators with other tools where users can clearly see what are you trying to solve, you can benchmark on the performance, size, storage, cost, features and other factors to give a quick glance why its better.
DevRel - DevRel can be a key player in taking this to the next level, intelligent DevRel will focus on the making the users/customers understand and give them the right education about the product, how to use it , production use-cases etc by various mediums like blogs, videos, conferences and many other things. I cannot write what a DevRel does in a paragraph as that really varies for different organisation expectations and the strong pointers for a DevRel/DevAdvocate. But hiring a DevRel at the right time can be really helpful if things get implemented in a right way where you know what purpose they are solving and working towards making that happen.

The list is also long tbh and I think I will need to publish this as a long blog at some point in time. But overall if you can clearly define the problem , how your solution solves it, if its open source and you have a revenue model then you are overall in a good shape. I am not saying that every good product has to be open source but the adoption rate definitely increases with it.

What are your thoughts on creating successful products in cluttered space?

Civo Navigate

I am headed straight to London for Civo Navigate a conference very close to me as I have helped in shaping that up, I will be giving 2 sessions and 2 workshops. So if you want to learn about WebAssembly and Kubernetes security then you should definitely buy the tickets as all of this comes included with the ticket.

Use this link for your $15 tickets(Only 5 left)

Content I created and working on

I am also working on a new book and really excited for this will, plus close to 100 copies getting sold out for my CKA book.
Yes very soon WASM content will be coming on Kubesimplify YouTube channel and I am very excited about this as I am partnering with another person on this.
Kubernetes 1.28 sidecar containers
CKA scenarios book info

Awesome Reads

What's new for security in Kubernetes 1.28 - Validation admission policy moves to beta with built in support using CEL to validate the workloads at admission without relying on third party software. Another feature includes stable release of a SelfSubjectReview API allows users to identify attributes about themselves.
Updating Images in Review Apps Using Git & ArgoCD with the new Appset Plugin Generator - This pos walks through a complete demo POC on how to use ArgoCD as a CI tool as well using the concept of plugin generator and building your own plugin to extend the functionality of ArgoCD.
Efficient Access to Shared GPU Resources: Part 6 - Another series of interesting blog post series by Kubernetes at CERN. For anyone using Kubeflow, GPU’s, this is nice series of articles on training large scale models, methodologies and results.
A comprehensive guide on authoring plugins for Fermyon Spin - Spin is a framework to bootstrap your WASM apps quickly form local to production. This article shows how you can create and distribute your own plugin and use it with spin, I have used the k8s plugin but here author creates check-for-update plugin and shows the entire process to building, testing and distributing.
Kubernetes 1.28: A New (alpha) Mechanism For Safer Cluster Upgrades - This blog describes the mixed version proxy, a new alpha feature in Kubernetes 1.28. The mixed version proxy enables an HTTP request for a resource to be served by the correct API server in cases where there are multiple API servers at varied versions in a cluster. For example, this is useful during a cluster upgrade, or when you're rolling out the runtime configuration of the cluster's control plane.
KubeCon NA 2023 Schedule is out - KubeCon NA schedule is out and I will be speaking on Chaos mesh with Zhou Zhiqiang. Do not forget to add this session to your schedule if you are attending KubeCon in person.