Originally reported by The Register (theregister.co.uk) around the time of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2017 in Austin, Texas.
The Kubernetes Vendor Landscape at KubeCon 2017
KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017 in Austin, Texas served as a catalyst for a wave of enterprise Kubernetes announcements. With the holiday season approaching and engineering attention spans shortening, vendors used the conference window to surface new products, integrations, and open-source contributions aimed at the DevOps community.
Kubernetes — the open-source container orchestration system originally developed at Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) — had by late 2017 become the de facto standard for managing containerized workloads at scale. Even AWS, the dominant public cloud provider, had moved toward Kubernetes support, signaling widespread industry adoption.
Microsoft: Open Service Broker for Azure and AKS Growth
Microsoft used the conference to highlight what it described as 700% year-over-year growth in Kubernetes usage on Azure. This figure should be interpreted carefully: the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) had only formally launched in October 2017, and Microsoft’s baseline likely incorporated usage data from its predecessor, the Azure Container Service (ACS). The raw percentage is striking but difficult to evaluate without absolute user numbers.
More concretely, Microsoft announced that it was open-sourcing the Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA), built on the Open Service Broker API — a shared specification that allows cloud platforms like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry to expose and consume platform services in a standardized way.
In practice, OSBA allows developers to manage Azure services directly through the Kubernetes API. A common use case would be using OSBA together with Helm (the Kubernetes package manager) to deploy a WordPress instance backed by an Azure Database for MySQL, rather than running the database inside a container — a pattern that improves operational reliability.
Additional Microsoft announcements included:
- An early-stage command-line interface for the Kubernetes Service Catalog
- Kashti, a dashboard and visualization tool for Brigade CI/CD pipelines, previewed at the Open Source Summit in Prague
CoreOS Tectonic 1.8: Keeping Pace with Upstream Kubernetes
CoreOS released Tectonic 1.8, its enterprise Kubernetes distribution, updating it to match the upstream Kubernetes 1.8 release from September 2017. The update bundled:
- Prometheus 2.0 — the open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit
- Vault — HashiCorp’s secrets management tool for cloud-native environments
Keeping an enterprise Kubernetes distribution aligned with rapid upstream releases is a meaningful engineering challenge, and version parity with Kubernetes 1.8 was a notable milestone for Tectonic users who needed stable, supported enterprise tooling.
Codefresh: Helm Chart Support for CI/CD
Codefresh, a CI/CD platform designed for containerized applications, announced plans to demo support for Helm Charts at KubeCon, with general availability expected shortly after the conference. Helm Charts are templated Kubernetes manifest packages that simplify application deployment and version management — making native Helm support a meaningful addition to any Kubernetes-native CI/CD workflow.
Bitnami Kubeapps: One-Click App Deployment on Kubernetes
Application packaging company Bitnami debuted Kubeapps, an in-cluster application deployment environment designed to make launching applications on Kubernetes clusters more accessible. The experience is conceptually similar to the one-click application installers found on platforms like DigitalOcean — a curated catalog of applications deployable without deep Kubernetes expertise.
Red Hat OpenShift: Expanded Runtime Support
Red Hat announced expanded application runtime support within OpenShift, its enterprise container platform built on Docker and Kubernetes. The supported runtimes added or confirmed at this time included:
- Java EE
- WildFly Swarm
- Eclipse MicroProfile
- Eclipse Vert.x
- Node.js
- Spring Boot
These additions reflected the growing demand for polyglot microservices architectures, where Java and JavaScript workloads coexist on a shared container platform.
Kasten K10: Kubernetes for Compliance and Business Continuity
Startup Kasten, founded by former engineers from Amazon, Google, and Facebook, emerged from stealth mode at KubeCon with K10, an enterprise Kubernetes platform focused on compliance and business continuity concerns — areas that were (and remain) underserved in the container ecosystem.
Kasten also open-sourced Kanister, a framework for managing application-level data operations on Kubernetes. A representative use case is backing up a MongoDB database running in a Kubernetes cluster for disaster recovery — a workflow that requires coordination between Kubernetes orchestration and application-aware data management.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.0: Serverless, Kubernetes, and Windows
Pivotal signaled the forthcoming release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) 2.0, its commercial distribution of the open-source Cloud Foundry application platform. Key features announced included:
- Pivotal Functions Service — serverless computing capabilities integrated into PCF
- Pivotal Container Service (PKS) — a Kubernetes distribution co-developed with Google and VMware
- Windows Server 2016 container support — broadening PCF’s applicability to Windows-based workloads
Key Takeaways
KubeCon 2017 illustrated just how quickly Kubernetes had moved from a Google-incubated experiment to the foundation of enterprise container strategy across the industry. The consistent themes across vendor announcements were:
- Standardization — shared APIs (Open Service Broker API, Helm) reducing vendor lock-in
- Operational maturity — monitoring (Prometheus), secrets management (Vault), and disaster recovery (Kanister) becoming first-class concerns
- Accessibility — tools like Kubeapps and AKS lowering the barrier to entry for teams new to Kubernetes
- Enterprise readiness — compliance, Windows support, and business continuity features addressing needs beyond the early adopter community
Many of the projects and products announced here — Helm, Prometheus, OpenShift, PKS, Kubeapps — have since evolved significantly. This post reflects the state of the ecosystem as of December 2017.