This week's news: Countdown to KubeCon

Every Wednesday, Nick Chase and Eric Gregory from Mirantis go over the week’s cloud native and industry news on the Radio Cloud Native podcast.

This week, Nick and Eric discussed:

• Our schedule for KubeCon NA 2022

• Broadcom's effort to speed up its VMware acquisition timeline

• The Eclipse Foundation's 2022 IoT and Edge Developer Survey

• And other stories on the podcast, including Microsoft Ignite and the end of Office, the relationship between software supply chain security and computer science education, and more

You can watch the entire episode below or download the podcast from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to tune into the next show live, follow Mirantis on LinkedIn to receive our announcement of the next broadcast.

Eric: KubeCon is next week! John Jainschigg and I will be there recording live from Detroit, and if you’ll be there too, come say hi at Booth G9, where we’ll be showcasing Lens 6, Amazee’s Lagoon, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, and much more. We’ve got some giveaways in both our virtual and in-person booths…both have daily raffle prizes where you can enter to win a LEGO Robot Inventor kit, free annual Lens Pro subscriptions, or a PlayStation 5. In Detroit, you can pick up a free chocolate bar that contains coupons for 30% off training courses from Mirantis Training, or one of three golden tickets for a free on-demand Cloud Native Development Bootcamp course worth $3,000 USD.

We’re also proud to have talks from several Mirantis folks: 

On Wednesday October 26 at 2:30pm Eastern time, Christian Huebner, Principal Architect at Mirantis, and Amar Kapadia, Software Engineer at Aarna Networks, will lead a session called Implementing Private 5G Networks for Enterprises with Kubernetes, where they’ll introduce a new type of private network built using 5G technology – one that delivers numerous benefits over existing wired and wireless networks. They’ll demonstrate how private 5G networks can be built using cloud native functions that are orchestrated by Kubernetes, instead of purpose-built appliances.

Then on Thursday October 27, at 11:55am, Senior Engineers Jussi Nummelin from Mirantis and Rastislav Szabo from Kubermatic will give a talk called Remote Control Planes with Konnectivity, where they’ll explore whether it’s possible for the control plane to be located in a different datacenter than the associated worker nodes, even when there’s network-level disconnection separating the control and worker planes. 

Finally, Mirantis and Sysdig are jointly sponsoring a mixer at Anchor Baron Wednesday October 26, beginning at 8:00 p.m. So come join us there, have some food and drinks on Mirantis & Sysdig, and talk Kubernetes and cloud native security.

Eric: The Register reports that Broadcom has appealed to EU antitrust regulators to make an early decision on their acquisition of VMware. If successful, this move would preclude a second and more detailed phase of antitrust investigation, cutting about four months from the acquisition timeline. So what’s the rationale for this special treatment? Broadcom claims that their takeover of VMware would increase competition in public cloud, with the implication that this acquisition will enable them to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. 

In any case, VMware customers remain wary. A July report from Gartner found that 56% of VMware customers were pessimistic about the acquisition, with many small and medium enterprises looking for alternative stacks to mitigate what they expect will be “extraordinary price increases and challenges with support.”

Nick: The Eclipse Foundation has released the findings from its 2022 IoT and Edge Developer Survey, and while some of the results are pretty much a gimme, there are a couple of surprises in there.

Some not-surprises:

• First off, Edge computing is gaining traction in real world applications, with all of the top use cases, including Artificial Intelligence, Control Devices, Data exchange, and Data analytics, all showing significant increases in adoption.

• Java, C and C++ are the most popular programming languages for edge devices, while Java is the preferred language for IoT gateways and edge nodes. 

• Top three concerns for developers are connectivity, security, and data collection & analytics. 

• Agriculture (23%) is the leading industry for Industrial IoT and edge computing technology, followed by industrial automation (22%) automotive (20%) and energy & smart cities (17%).

• Container images (49%) are the most frequently selected edge computing artifact.

On the surprising side:

• MQTT, which is a lightweight publish-subscribe communications protocol that was specifically designed for IoT, continues to be the most widely used IIoT communication protocol, though the report notes that there seems to be increased fragmentation. HTTP/HTTPS and REST are slightly down, while alternative communication protocols such as TCP/IP, AMQP0.9, and In house or proprietary seem to be growing.

• While you might expect to see something of a stranglehold of the big 3, that's not necessarily the case here.  As far as middleware, it was AWS IoT (32%), Microsoft Azure IoT (22%), and Google Cloud IoT Platform (17%) at the top for just 71% of the market, and with Google Cloud IoT being discontinued, they expect further diversification.  What's more, they also saw increased public cloud fragmentation, with Amazon AWS down 8% to 36%, Microsoft Azure down 11% to 18%, ouch, and Google Cloud Platform down 4% to 16%.

• I had expected the most popular operating system to be something like Raspbian or Alpine, but actually it's Ubuntu.  And full Server Ubuntu, too, not Ubuntu Core.  Though I'm sure that part of that is gateways and such it's not that far ahead of Raspbian, so I'm thinking that there's a lot of Ubuntu devices out there. 

• And finally, while we tend to be very Kubernetes-focused, the top container orchestrator was listed as simply "Docker", which I'm taking to mean Docker Swarm.  "Other Kubernetes" didn't even make the top 3, though I should point out that this is an Eclipse Foundation survey, and number 3 was "Eclipse Fog05".  But still.

Check out the podcast for more of this week's stories.