KubeCon North America 2022 (Detroit) was a blast - but since I knew I won’t be able to talk with every single vendor, I took photos of every single booth.
I love KubeCon because it shows where the industry is headed. Hence, I extracted every word on every booth and analyzed the results.
Without further ado, here is my analysis of 290 KubeCon 2022 vendor booths.
If you find this helpful, others will, too - so share it!
Here are some of the startup booths:
And here are some of the silver & gold sponsors (click here for the entire library of images):
Trends
What are the up-and-coming tools, best practices and philosophies? Let’s start with a simple word cloud of all the text elements of every booth at KubeCon 2022:
Obviously Kubernetes was the most common word (even beating filler words like ‘the’, which are removed from the word cloud). But here are some less obvious findings:
23 booths mentioned ‘minutes’ or other time-based adjectives (‘microseconds’) hinting at fast time-to-value being an important factor.
'Automation' seems to be not front-and-center (yet), a surprising finding for an industry founded on a philosophy around it.
Platforms are the poster child - quite literally beating ‘devops’ in number of mentions
‘Scale’ was mentioned 16 times, because we all know when K8s troubles start…
Only 15 mentions of ‘Cost’ make it seem like the industry is not yet prepared for the current economic situation.
‘Serverless’ was only mentioned 3 times pointing out that in spite of its buzz the adoption is slower than anticipated.
Kubernetes day 2, i.e. the management that follows an organization’s adoption seems to be of growing interest (42 mentions of ‘manage’ and ‘management’).
Here is another view at the data showing how many of the 290 booths had a certain keyword:
It seems that 2023 will be a direct continuation of 2022 focusing on security scaling and Kubernetes day 2 operations management the biggest challenge since adoption has plateaued and or is growing slowly (According to CNCF’s 2021 Annual Survey, 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes).
Buzz
KubeCon 2022 was a hybrid event. So, here are some stats around the digital buzz accompanying this year’s event:
99,772 Tweets
322 Slack posts (there were channels for every vendor and every topic)
3845 Google searches
237 Reddit comments
Are you more of a visual person? Here is a heat map of the topics discussed on Twitter:
credits @EMA Research
Booth setup
Going through all these booths, I noticed that some truly stood out, so I made a few rankings. These are the booths you would’ve stopped by, had you had more time to explore the solutions showcase (even if you had no clue what the company is offering):
Cutest logo
 | A DevOps virtual assistant that transforms complex processes into simple conversations. | |
 | Seamless communication of K8s by creating logical application boundaries known as Slices. | |
 | Well, you probably know 😉 |
Boldest claim
 | “DevOps is dead” | |
 | “Monitoring is worthless” | |
 | “Not afraid to commit” | A declarative and flexible continuous deployment solution to make CD possible for all devs |
Most creative
Awesome steering wheel (“drive that observability”) |  | |
See and secure your cloud-native applications using actionable context - so your devs can proactively fix risks | Extra lights (I know, it's basic - but it stood out) |  |
Avoid cluster sprawl with a unique multi-tenant architecture and operate Kubernetes as a hyperscaler | Great design |  |
Star Wars themed |  | |
🏀 |  | |