DOP 325: KubeCon North America 2025 Review

Episode 325

Show Notes

#325: KubeCon North America 2025 wrapped in Atlanta with unseasonably cold weather and some significant shifts in the cloud native ecosystem. The conference showed fewer vendors backing CNCF projects on the show floor, with key concerns emerging around maintainer burnout—exemplified by NGINX Ingress being deprecated despite running on 40% of Kubernetes clusters worldwide. The event revealed a maturing ecosystem where AI moved from buzzword to operational reality, with focus shifting toward conformance standards, security policies, and enterprise readiness rather than the hype cycle of previous years.

The discussions revealed a consolidation pattern where larger corporations like AWS, Microsoft, and Google are increasingly the only ones who can sustain open source project maintenance. Startups and smaller companies face difficult choices: maintain existing revenue streams, pivot entirely to AI, or attempt both and fail at both. Meanwhile, AI adoption in the ops space remains behind other sectors, with developers emerging as the primary buyers for AI tooling—a shift that’s reshaping go-to-market strategies across vendors. Platform engineering continues as a parallel major theme, focusing on operationalizing infrastructure at scale.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was ingress-nginx deprecated?

Whitney Lee reports on DevOps Paradox episode 325 that the project had two maintainers, both volunteers, neither paid to work on it. She says a maintainer told her roughly 40 percent of Kubernetes clusters worldwide use it, and that there is no clear migration path. Viktor Farcic treats the announcement as acknowledging a reality that had existed for years rather than a sudden decision.

Are companies behind CNCF projects disappearing?

Viktor Farcic says on DevOps Paradox episode 325 that he cannot prove it with numbers, but his impression from the KubeCon Atlanta show floor is that exhibitors who are the company behind a CNCF project keep declining, while companies merely using those projects remain plentiful. His concern follows directly: those companies pay the maintainers, and projects without paid maintainers die slowly or quickly depending on the project.

Why has AI not been adopted in operations?

Viktor Farcic offers a blunt test on DevOps Paradox episode 325: put AI in your talk title at KubeCon and watch attendance drop. He argues vendors target developers instead, since there are between ten and thirty developers for every operations person, making ops a small market per seat. What changed, he adds, is that developers turned out to be buyers after years of buying nothing.

What were the themes at KubeCon North America 2025?

Whitney Lee summarises Atlanta on DevOps Paradox episode 325 as settling into the boring parts of AI, operationalising it, with a healthy amount of platform engineering alongside. Keynotes covered AI conformance and safety rather than novelty, and a new Kubernetes working group is forming around AI conformance. She also heard far more about SPIFFE and SPIRE than usual, for automating workload identity for AI workloads.

Will AI innovation come from established companies or new ones?

Viktor Farcic expects new ones on DevOps Paradox episode 325, because starting from scratch means no existing intellectual property to protect and, counterintuitively, more speed. He describes the trap facing an existing company as three bad choices: keep the current business and miss the wave, abandon revenue it cannot survive without, or split its people across both and build nothing substantial in either.

Will the CNCF still matter in ten years?

Darin Pope predicts on DevOps Paradox episode 325 that it will not exist by 2035. Viktor Farcic disagrees on the detail: it will exist, but resemble the Linux Foundation, still necessary and used by everyone without drawing tens of thousands to conferences. His point is that boring technology is fine, just poor ground for startups, since nobody launches new operating systems at a conference.

What is the DevOps Paradox podcast?

DevOps Paradox is a weekly podcast co-hosted by Darin Pope and Viktor Farcic, covering DevOps, platform engineering, and modern software delivery. Episode 325 is the pair’s KubeCon North America review with Whitney Lee, covering the ingress-nginx deprecation, shrinking maintainer funding, and how AI showed up on the show floor. Every episode page carries the audio, the video, and a full transcript.

Episode Transcript

Read the Full Transcript

Topics

Share and Download

Guests

Whitney Lee

Whitney Lee

Whitney is a kind and curious human who loves exploring and explaining tools in the cloud native landscape. She has delivered two KubeCon keynotes and countless fun, funny, and informative community keynotes and breakout talks around the world. She runs a vibrant YouTube channel, co-hosts You Choose!—a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’-style journey through the CNCF landscape—and also co-hosts Cloud Native Live and the podcast Software Defined Interviews. She works as a Senior Technical Advocate at Datadog and is usually noodling on a coding project or two.

Hosts

Darin Pope

Darin Pope

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a member of the Google Developer Experts and Docker Captains groups, and published author.

His big passions are DevOps, Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices, Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment (CI/CD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD).

He often speaks at community gatherings and conferences.

He has published DevOps Paradox and Test-Driven Java Development.

His random thoughts and tutorials can be found in his blog The DevOps Toolkit.