News
Feb 20, 2025
The evolving Kubernetes landscape in Europe: Q&A with Sidero Labs
Kubernetes adoption in Europe is taking a markedly different path than in the United States. Sean Saperstein, Head of Sales at Sidero Labs, has the chance to talk with decision makers and experts around the globe and within Europe. We asked him about the Kubernetes landscape in Europe, the challenges businesses are facing, and what organizations can expect in the future.
What trends are you noticing in the European market regarding Kubernetes adoption and operations?
"There is a clear shift towards more data sovereignty and privacy. This has always been important, but with the shifting political climate in the U.S., it is becoming increasingly relevant.
Edge computing is also seeing a shift, with more edge workloads being containerized and modernized with Kubernetes. Generally, modernization and professionalization are themes across Kubernetes solutions. As organizations look to put the applications and compute closer to the user, security becomes more of a concern with how to locally manage those systems. Because of this, organizations are continually looking for edge expertise to make sure they have a sound, secure, and easily updatable solution.
Not entirely unique to Europe is the increasing interest in security and Europe seems to be more proactive than the U.S. Just look at the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) as one example. As cyber threats grow in frequency, sophistication, and level of destruction, organizations seek solutions that embed security into their Kubernetes strategy rather than bolting it on as an afterthought. "
Do you see a difference in European organizations' approach to Kubernetes versus the U.S.?
"Yes, and data sovereignty plays a major role. While many U.S. businesses fully commit to hyperscalers like AWS or Azure, European organizations are less likely to go all-in. They also prefer doing business with other European organizations and European data centers.
Overall, they tend to have a more diverse mix of Kubernetes environments, using a combination of on-prem and various cloud environments. This makes agility and flexibility much more important for European enterprises, and as a result, they are also more open to cloud native solutions."
What are you hearing from European customers about their challenges with Kubernetes operations?
"The preference for on-prem often limits the solutions available and makes it difficult to find one that works well. European businesses are in need of a single, uniform solution that integrates seamlessly across all their edge and on-prem environments with the flexibility to manage highly diverse environments reliably and consistently without increasing operational complexity."
How is edge computing shaping the Kubernetes landscape in Europe?
"There is a huge shift towards Kubernetes on the edge and this has brought increased expectations. There is a move away from the existing lightweight solutions and toward more mature, production-grade solutions. Companies expect these solutions to not only be functional but scalable and reliable, and these expectations will only continue to grow."
How are organizations balancing the need for centralized container management with distributed edge computing requirements?
"In short, they’re not really “balancing” the need. They are seeking out solutions that work across both centralized and edge environments. They need to run workloads at the edge. They need to run workloads in data centers. And they need their infrastructure to run on a single underlying architecture and toolset. They need all of this.
Security is also more significant. In a data center, there are inherent security protections, such as physical access controls and advanced firewalls. Now, organizations have similar security expectations when it comes to edge environments."
Could you share your perspective on the role of bare metal Kubernetes solutions in today’s enterprise environments?
"There are two things at play here: (1) a movement to control costs by moving off the cloud and (2) removal of the virtualization layer in preference of Kubernetes, which improves on the resource balancing and workload management of a hypervisor.
Both of these result in organizations looking to run Kubernetes on bare metal as one solution. This is important because bare metal provides resiliency, redundancy, and the ability to take full advantage of physical resources. It makes the full power of that hardware available directly to the cluster at the container orchestration level."
Where do you see the greatest opportunities for innovation in the Kubernetes space, particularly in Europe?
"The most significant opportunities for innovation in Kubernetes revolve around simplicity and automation. As organizations move toward fully hybrid clusters and edge-specific workloads, they’re going to need everything surrounding that work to be easier and more secure. They don’t want to allocate new resources to managing all of these processes. They will need solutions that ease deployment and are inherently secure. The future of Kubernetes is the flexibility to run where you want, however you want, with a common underlying platform."
What lessons have you learned about successful Kubernetes implementations?
"Well-planned, simple implementations are always best. Once you start overcomplicating it and adding minutia, that’s when it fails. Always take the time to step back and design something that is simple and uniform."
