DevOps Paradox DOP 325: KubeCon North America 2025 Review
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Nov 19, 2025 Whitney Lee, a CNCF ambassador and seasoned KubeCon reviewer, shares insights from KubeCon North America 2025. The conference spotlighted worrisome trends, like the deprecation of NGINX Ingress amid maintainer burnout. Big players like AWS and Google are becoming the mainstay for open-source project support. AI transitioned from buzzword to operational focus, with developers emerging as key buyers of AI tools. Meanwhile, startups face tough choices: pivot to AI, maintain revenue, or risk failing at both.
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Maintainer Shortage Threatens Projects
- Maintenance resources for CNCF projects are shrinking as vendor-backed maintainers disappear.
- Victor warns this trend risks slow, painful decline for many open-source projects without corporate support.
NGINX Ingress Deprecation Example
- The hosts discussed NGINX Ingress being deprecated with little maintenance capacity.
- Victor quoted a maintainer saying 40% of Kubernetes clusters still use it despite lacking a clear migration path.
Big Cloud Firms Will Decide Survivors
- Larger cloud providers are increasingly the only organizations that can fund and maintain key open-source projects.
- Whitney predicts only a limited set of projects will survive long-term without major corporate backing.