Cracks in KubeCon’s Invincibility Shield

To the casual observer walking the polished halls of the Georgia World Congress Center this week, KubeCon North America 2025 looked every bit the unstoppable juggernaut it has always been. The sponsor boards stretched wall-to-wall. The show floor buzzed with vendors, and the queue for re-entry snaked around the building — though, truth be told, that may have had more to do with Georgia’s abundance of metal detectors than with any surge in attendance. The House of Kube party line? Longer than ever. And standing in near-freezing temperatures to get in probably sent more than a few attendees scurrying back to their hotels for a nightcap instead of a dance floor.

At first glance, it’s the same story we’ve seen in Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Detroit: Kubernetes reigning supreme. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) continues to project confidence, and the narrative of Pax Kubernetes seems as strong as ever.

But scratch beneath the surface, and you start to see something different. Hairline fractures. Subtle tremors in the cloud-native force field.

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

Mike Vizard’s recent article on CloudNativeNow.com cited the CNCF’s latest report, which proudly notes that the global cloud-native developer community has reached 15.6 million. That sounds like another record. But what the press release doesn’t shout quite as loudly is that the rate of growth has slowed — and in some categories, flattened.

Meanwhile, KubeCon North America attendance has been flat or slightly down for four years running. Europe’s numbers are only marginally better. More tellingly, about 60% of attendees in Atlanta are first-timers. Do the math: if overall attendance is static but more than half are new faces, where are the repeat visitors going?

It’s admirable that CNCF continues to draw in new converts, but that kind of turnover raises a bigger question: Is the community renewing itself — or simply replacing those drifting away? It’s hard to sustain an ecosystem if you’re leaking veterans as fast as you’re onboarding rookies.

The Plateau Problem

There’s another inconvenient truth buried in the data: only about 15% of all enterprise applications are currently built on Kubernetes. That number hasn’t moved much.

For years, Kubernetes has been the darling of greenfield innovation — net-new, cloud-first, digitally native projects. But when it comes to the brownfield legacy world, adoption remains painfully slow. The optimist sees “massive opportunity.” The realist wonders why, after nearly a decade of momentum, the platform still can’t make serious inroads into the other 85%.

There’s a sense that Kubernetes has matured — and maybe, in tech terms, “mature” is just another way of saying boring.

A Change in the Air

I’ve been attending KubeCon since its scrappy early days, when hallway conversations crackled with discovery and risk-taking. This year, something felt… muted. The vibe was less “revolution” and more “routine.”

Even the crowd-pumping antics of the Georgia World Congress Center staff — cheering as attendees filed through security — couldn’t manufacture the old spark. The code used to be what made people cheer.

Maybe it’s just the weather. Or the fatigue that sets in when a movement becomes an industry. But I can’t shake the sense that the energy has shifted.

The CNCF Constellation Expands

Part of the reason may be that Kubernetes isn’t the only star in the CNCF sky anymore. OpenTelemetry (OTEL) has become a celestial body in its own right, fueling the exploding observability market. In some ways, OTEL and its cousins — Prometheus, Grafana, and others — together form a parallel gravitational system within the CNCF ecosystem.

At this point, one could argue that observability has as much traction, developer energy, and enterprise momentum as Kubernetes itself. The CNCF may have evolved from a single-star system into a binary or even trinary one, where Kube’s orbit is no longer the only one that matters.

Has AI Killed the Kube Star?

Which brings me to the new kid on the block — or maybe the new boss entirely: Artificial Intelligence.

Just last year, the conversation at KubeCon was about how AI could enhance Kubernetes — smarter scheduling, better cluster optimization, automated remediation. This year, the tone feels different. There’s a growing recognition that AI might not just be another workload running on Kube — it might be building its own stack altogether.

AI training and inference workloads are incredibly demanding, highly specialized, and increasingly run on dedicated infrastructure. The question now is whether Kubernetes can evolve into the control plane for the AI-native era, or whether something new will emerge to displace it.

For the first time in a decade, Kubernetes faces a credible challenger — not from another orchestrator, but from an entirely new computing paradigm.

Normal Cycles or Warning Signs?

To be fair, not every dip in enthusiasm signals decline. The CNCF itself is in a period of transition — absorbing the OpenInfra Foundation, welcoming a new Executive Director, and normalizing after a decade of explosive growth. It could just be the organization catching its breath.

And maybe Atlanta’s frigid temps and metal-detector delays simply made everyone grumpy. I’ve seen communities hit “the middle-age plateau” before — right before reinventing themselves.

Still, if you look closely, the shine on that invincibility shield is starting to dull.

Shimmy’s Take

Kubernetes isn’t going anywhere — not this year, not next. But invincibility isn’t a permanent state.

Ecosystems, like empires, can crumble quietly before anyone admits the cracks were there all along.

If the CNCF wants to keep the crown, it needs to confront three truths:

1. Flat adoption means you can’t grow by repeating last year’s playbook.
2. High churn in attendees suggests community fatigue.
3. AI and observability are rewriting the rules of what “cloud-native” even means.
   

Next stop: KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam. If the energy rebounds there, maybe this was just a cold week in Georgia. But if the flatline continues — well, we may be watching the moment the unstoppable finally meets the inevitable.

This is your globe-trotting correspondent, Alan Shimel, reporting from KubeCon.