The evolution of the Kubernetes container management platform was on full display today as the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference kicked off in Seattle.

Noteworthy on the first day of keynotes was a laundry list of major tech players making announcements at the event. In addition to Google LLC, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., other firms making Kubernetes-related news on Tuesday included Oracle Corp. and Nutanix Inc.

“Last year, when I talked to users at this show, most of the people using Kubernetes were building their own stack,” said Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “Today, what I hear is maturation of the platform.”

Miniman spoke with co-host John Furrier (@furrier) on the first day of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event, and they discussed the competitive forces jockeying for position in the Kubernetes ecosystem, the addition of a significant new project and the varied interests involved in container technology.

Not just about AWS

Although the news from Seattle reinforced the evolution of the container orchestration platform, the analysts cautioned that the open-source nature of Kubernetes did not necessarily mean that major enterprise computing companies would automatically reap the rewards.

“This is more than just AWS,” Furrier said. “This is about multicloud, hybrid cloud, and a lot of forces are at play competitively to make sure that Amazon doesn’t run the table.”

One of the major announcements made during Tuesday’s keynotes was that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation would accept etcd, a distributed key-value store owned by Red Hat Inc., as a hosted project. Users of etcd in production today include Uber Technologies Inc., Nordstrom Inc. and the New York Times.

“That came out of CoreOS to solve a … problem that they had, to make sure when you’re rolling upgrades, you don’t reboot the cluster all at once and then your application isn’t able to be there,” Miniman explained.

The gathering of the Kubernetes community underscores the growing diversity of expertise in the enterprise computing world, a potential challenge for CNCF to meet the needs of its varied constituency.

“How does the CNCF and KubeCon evolve as you start to cross-pollinate app developers who just want infrastructure as code, IT people who want to take over a new kind of IT, and then pure open-source community players?” Furrier asked. “This has now become a melting pot.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s weeklong coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon:

Photo: CNCF/KubeCon