Originally reported by Forbes. This article summarizes key announcements from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019, held in San Diego, California.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019: The Cloud Native Ecosystem in Full Force
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is responsible for governing the open source projects that form the critical building blocks of modern infrastructure. Its most prominent project, Kubernetes, has become the de facto standard for container orchestration at scale.
By 2019, CNCF had grown to over 20 hosted projects and 500 member organizations, representing one of the most active open source communities in the industry. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 saw a reported 50% increase in attendance compared to the previous year’s event in Seattle, drawing participants from traditional infrastructure incumbents like HPE and VMware through to early-stage startups.
More than 100 announcements emerged from the event. Below are ten of the most technically significant.
1. Helm 3 Is Launched
Helm — a CNCF incubating project and the most widely used package manager for Kubernetes — released its third major version at the event. Helm is maintained primarily by contributors from Microsoft, Google, Codefresh, and Bitnami.
The headline change in Helm 3 is the removal of Tiller, the server-side component that previously ran inside the Kubernetes cluster and was a persistent source of security and operational complaints. By eliminating Tiller, Helm 3 relies entirely on kubeconfig credentials and Kubernetes RBAC for access control, significantly simplifying the security model.
A migration path from Helm 2 to Helm 3 was published alongside the release to help teams upgrade existing chart deployments.
2. AWS, Intuit, and Weaveworks Collaborate on Argo Flux and the GitOps Engine
Two of the most prominent GitOps tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem — Argo CD (developed at Intuit) and Flux (developed at Weaveworks) — had significant functional overlap. At KubeCon 2019, the two teams announced a collaboration, informally referred to as Argo Flux, to converge their shared core logic into a common library called the GitOps Engine.
AWS added momentum to the collaboration by announcing it would integrate GitOps tooling based on this work into Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and would use Flagger for canary deployments on AWS App Mesh.
The GitOps Engine project aimed to allow different CD tools to share a common, well-tested reconciliation layer, reducing duplication across the ecosystem.
3. Microsoft Brings Confidential Computing to Kubernetes
Microsoft announced support for confidential computing within Kubernetes, leveraging Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). Confidential computing protects data in use — meaning data remains encrypted and isolated even while code is actively executing on the CPU, guarding against privileged-access attacks or compromised hypervisors.
Azure customers can create AKS clusters with SGX-capable nodes and install the confidential computing device plugin. Workloads built with the Open Enclave SDK can then be scheduled onto nodes that support Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), enabling hardware-enforced isolation at the pod level.
4. Red Hat Launches CodeReady Workspaces 2.0
Red Hat’s CodeReady Workspaces, first announced in February 2019, is a browser-based, Kubernetes-native development environment built on the open source Eclipse Che IDE project. It is optimized for Red Hat OpenShift and RHEL environments.
Version 2.0 deepened the integration between the development environment and OpenShift production clusters, allowing developers to build and test applications in an environment that closely mirrors production. The goal is to eliminate the classic “works on my machine” problem by providing workspace definitions as code that all team members share.
5. Mirantis Launches Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS)
Mirantis announced a continuously updated, multi-cloud Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) offering built on upstream, unmodified Kubernetes — without proprietary API extensions — to ensure application portability across cloud providers.
The announcement followed Mirantis’s high-profile acquisition of Docker’s enterprise business, signalling a strategic pivot toward Kubernetes-centric enterprise infrastructure.
6. O’Reilly Acquires Katacoda
Katacoda provides browser-based, interactive learning environments that spin up real Linux and Kubernetes infrastructure on demand — no local installation required. Users practice with the actual tools they would use in production, making it uniquely effective for hands-on DevOps and cloud native training.
O’Reilly’s acquisition of Katacoda extended its online learning platform with real-environment, scenario-based labs, enabling learners to move from reading about a technology to interacting with it without leaving the browser.
7. Portworx Launches PX-Autopilot
Portworx, a leading provider of container-native persistent storage, announced PX-Autopilot: a policy-driven automation layer that monitors storage consumption and automatically provisions additional block storage or resizes existing volumes when usage crosses a pre-configured threshold.
The product addresses a real operational pain point — stateful applications on Kubernetes that run out of disk space often fail in ways that are difficult to recover from. PX-Autopilot effectively brings autoscaling concepts, familiar from compute, to the storage layer in a cloud native context.
8. Diamanti Announces Spektra Hybrid Cloud Platform
Hyper-converged infrastructure vendor Diamanti announced Spektra, a hybrid cloud management platform designed to manage the full lifecycle of containerized workloads spanning on-premises infrastructure and public clouds.
Spektra provides a unified control plane — a single pane of glass — for managing storage across multiple registered Kubernetes clusters, and supports moving both applications and persistent data between clusters with minimal disruption. This addresses a key challenge for enterprises running workloads across heterogeneous Kubernetes environments.
9. Buoyant Announces Dive, a SaaS Control Plane for Kubernetes
Buoyant, the company behind the Linkerd service mesh, announced the private beta of Dive, a multi-tenant SaaS control plane for managing Kubernetes deployments at scale.
Dive is designed to make infrastructure changes auditable and collaborative: every change generates a permalink that teams can reference in Slack, issue trackers, or pull requests. Individual services get a dedicated homepage that can include SLOs, runbook links, and ownership metadata — effectively treating services as first-class objects with discoverable operational context.
Dive extends Linkerd’s observability and traffic management capabilities with a managed, multi-cluster control experience.
10. Rancher Announces General Availability of K3s for Edge Kubernetes
Rancher Labs announced the general availability of K3s, a lightweight, fully CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution purpose-built for resource-constrained environments such as IoT devices, edge nodes, and ARM-based hardware.
K3s is distributed as a single binary with a minimal footprint, stripping out cloud-provider integrations and legacy features that are unnecessary at the edge. Rancher partnered with ARM to optimize K3s for ARM architectures, making it practical to run a conformant Kubernetes distribution on devices that would otherwise be unable to support a standard Kubernetes installation.
Key Takeaways
- Maturity of the ecosystem: Announcements like Helm 3 and the GitOps Engine reflect the community moving from experimentation to production-grade tooling with clearly defined operational models.
- Security is a first-class concern: Microsoft’s confidential computing integration shows hardware-level security entering the Kubernetes stack.
- Edge and IoT adoption: K3s from Rancher signals Kubernetes expanding well beyond the data centre.
- Storage automation closing the gap: PX-Autopilot and Spektra address persistent pain points around stateful workloads that have historically lagged behind compute automation.
- Developer experience investment: CodeReady Workspaces 2.0 and the Katacoda acquisition reflect growing investment in reducing friction for developers working in cloud native environments.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 confirmed that Kubernetes has moved decisively from early adopter territory into mainstream enterprise infrastructure, with the surrounding ecosystem maturing rapidly to match.