Attention will be focused on two areas: software supply chain and eBPF

[rakhirhif8963]

While the cloud native ecosystem is flooded with various Kubernetes distributions, we may see more new entrants into this space.

Kubernetes is available in three flavors: open source, commercial, and managed.

Open source distributions include plain vanilla Kubernetes, Amazon EKS-D, K3s, and RKE2. Commercial distributions include Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, Rafay, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, and D2iQ Kubernetes Platform.

Public cloud providers are primarily focused on offering managed Kubernetes. Examples of managed Kubernetes distributions include services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, IBM Kubernetes Service, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Platform9 Managed Kubernetes. These distributions are not available to customers directly, but only through managed environments that are operated and managed by the providers.

In 2022, Google and Microsoft are likely to chile mobile database open-source Kubernetes distributions based on their managed offerings, GKE and AKS. These distributions will be positioned as production-grade Kubernetes environments that provide the same capabilities as managed services. Customers using these distributions will be able to easily migrate to cloud-native or hybrid managed services. This will help Google and Microsoft position their offerings as alternatives to AWS’s EKS-D and EKS-A.

Beyond provider-managed ones, we may see purpose-built, optimized Kubernetes distributions targeting IoT, edge, and AI workloads.

3. Increased attention to cloud security
With the focus on cybersecurity today, I expect to see open source projects and commercial offerings focused entirely on cloud native security.


The software supply chain is very similar to the supply chain in real commerce, where resources are consumed, then transformed, passed through a series of stages and processes, and finally delivered to the customer. Modern software development is the assembly and integration of various components, hosted in the public domain as open source projects. In a complex supply chain, a compromise of a piece of software can cause serious damage to multiple deployments.