#325: KubeCon NA 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.

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