Cloud Ecosystem Trends

This week CNCF published Emerging trends in the cloud native ecosystem with a list of trends that will continue to grow in 2025.

Top trends:
🚀 Cloud Cost Optimizations. With growing cloud adoption, businesses focus on controlling cloud costs using tools like Karpenter and OpenCost. The same trend was also highlighted by FinOps Foundation earlier this year.
🚀 Platform Engineering (I did overview there). Extend developer experience with platforms for observability, policies as a code, internal developer portals, security, CI/CD, and storage to speed up business development.
🚀 AI Synergy. The trend is to support AI training and operations in the cloud. New actively developed projects there:
- OPEA: a collection of cloud-native patterns for GenAI workloads
- Milvus: a high-performance vector database
- Kubeflow: a project to deploy machine-learning workflows on Kubernetes
- KServe: a toolset for serving predictive and generative machine-learning models
🚀 Observability Standards Unification. Projects like OpenTelemetry and the Observability TAG unify standards, minimize vendor locks, and reduce costs.
🚀 Security. Security is a top priority topic in CNCF. There are some newly graduated projects in that area (like Falco) and separate TAG-Security group that publishes white papers that offer directions to the industry on the topic of security.
🚀 Sustainability (more about GreenOps there).  Sustainability tools (like Kepler, OpenCost) measure carbon footprints of Kubernetes applications. The area is under active development now, but it already has promising open-source projects and standards.

It's interesting that overprovisioning and high resource waste is still the main problem in modern clouds. According to the Kubernetes Cost Benchmark Report clusters with 50 or more CPUs used only 13% of their provisioned capacity, memory utilization was at the level of 20%. This shows a huge opportunity for future optimizations.

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