Hello, cloud gurus. I'm Nigel Poulton, and welcome to Kubernetes This Month. The show that brings you all the top news and happenings in the world of Kubernetes. Now, while you're here, be sure to subscribe so you always know what's going on with Kubernetes and cloud native. Right then, the CNCF has released the second ever Kubernetes annual report.

And this is the one that reviews the health of the Kubernetes project, but also the people that are building and maintaining it. Things like whether or not there's enough people leading the project and contributing to it. So I think it's fair to say, and I fall into this trap myself at times, but because Kubernetes get so much attention and we're always hearing about how fast it's growing, it's easy to think that there's some endless line of people willing to help. Like, let's say if you wanted to help, you'd have to take your place at the back of a long line. Right? Well actually, probably not, but we'll get to that.

I think like with most reports, the headline numbers make everything look good. So all time contributors stands at over 62,000 with over 1,000 net new contributors last year. And then really fluffy stuff like, I don't know, over 70,000 members in the different Slack channels. I mean, it sounds a lot and it looks good, but what does it really mean? I don't know. However, number of groups, so working groups and special interest groups and the likes, with less than 10 unique reviewers is eight.

So eight groups with less than 10 reviewers. And look in the past, I've known a couple of important projects with as little as one to two people, actively working on them. And I really do mean important projects. So yeah, the big numbers always sound big and they paint a rosy picture, but boots on the ground and in the trenches day to day, it's often not so glamorous. In fact, meaningful contribution to the project involves two important things, one showing up and then two sticking around.

And plenty of people do the showing up part with the initial excitement, but not so many are good at the sticking around part. And that's arguably what's needed the most. So if you or anyone, you know, can give meaningful time and contributions to the project, get involved. Anyway, also covered and of interest is the need for contributors that work outside of the major clouds, and the real-world issue of burnout. Now with burnout being a real thing that impacts real people in real lives, it's good to see that the project is trying to make itself a safe place to raise the issue as well as provide facilities to avoid it and cope with it.

Anyway, for me, I thought the report was an interesting insight into some of the more behind the scenes Kubernetes stuff. Okay. So another report, but this time, the Transparency Report from the most recent KubeCon event in Valencia, Spain. And some of it's not great reading. As always though the headline numbers look pretty good.

We had over 7,000 in-person attendees, of which 65% were at their first KubeCon. So I really hope they enjoyed it. On the virtual side, the number was over 11,000. Now on the co-located event side of things, there was the first ever Cloud Native Telco day, and the first ever CTO summit. The latter event discussing things such as resiliency in multi-cloud environments.

Now on the topic of co-lo events, I mean, I'm always a big fan of them, and I think they're a great way to start the week, but the numbers were good for cloud native security day and GitOps Con with both of them having over 300 attendees. So the numbers are all good so far. However, the diversity stats, ah, now okay, they're possibly not helped by the fact that nearly half of the attendees chose not to divulge their gender. But still of those that did, and if my math is correct 86% of people that shared their gender were men. And if that is genuinely reflective, it's tragic.

Though, I will say this, and I'm a man at a male-dominated event - I get that, so I'm careful what I say, but I was there and I felt like the balance was way better than that when it came to people in positions of influence. And what I mean by that is people that were on stage, or at the booths, or running the event. I honestly felt like the balance there was way more like what it should be. So possibly, maybe it was just the attendees that were so male-dominated, but either way, this has got to get better. Well, look, I've included a link to the report in the show notes.

So feel free to check it out in your own time. Okay. So time for my other top picks from last month. Since we last spoke, Istio 1.14 was released and then it was patched with 1.14.1. And this is in addition to Istio being proposed as a CNCF project.

So lots going on in the Istio space. Anyway, look with this particular release, you get support for the SPIRE runtime with strongly attested identities, also telemetry improvements and a bunch more. Now Broadcom shocked probably all of us actually with their unsolicited offer to buy VMware for around 61 billion in cash and stock. Initial reactions were mainly of concern, especially with the way a lot of the industry reviewed some of their previous acquisitions, such as Symantec. However, hopefully this will be a net positive thing for all the great folks that work across both companies and the customers of both.

Now from a technology perspective, I'll be keen to see what happens to wares in the cloud native space, such as VMware Tanzu. Finally for this month, the CNCF is in the process of updating its Code of Conduct with a major objective being changes to the way incidents are resolved. This is no doubt in response to the infighting that we had over the handling of wearing masks at KubeCon EU, where I think it's fair to say that elements of both the CNCF and the wider community could have handled things better. Either way though, a robust code and governance of said code, is absolutely vital to a safe and thriving community. So let's hope we get this right.

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