Hottest trends in Kubernetes^® 2025: Fresh from Kubecon and CloudNativeCon Europe

With KubeCon EMEA 2025 over, we thought it would be good to take a look forward and talk about some of the trends we’ve seen in the market and give a sneak peak at some of the material we’re working on now.

State of Stateful Containers

With the broad adoption of Kubernetes well underway, more and more containerized apps require storage. This is because the apps themselves are covering more use cases than ever before and also because in the past containerized apps could offload the state to third party tools, such as databases run either by cloud providers or on VMs.

Now that Kubernetes is far more mature, we now see administrators running whatever was providing the state – databases for instance – in containers alongside the app itself.

This model allows operators to deploy apps alongside all their dependencies, rather than relying on third party integrations to provide the dependencies. Environments can be spun up quick, developers can test freely, and users are happy thanks to d potential changes in  downtime and responsiveness.

In today’s Kubernetes architecture, storage and state are priorities and should be treated as such with the same business continuity and disaster recovery planning and testing that any production application receives.

Fleet and Edge

Internet-of-things (IoT) processing took off around the same time as Kubernetes was introduced, which made them a natural fit. IoT required small, lightweight stacks of compute power distributed across a wide area to maximize the value of processing all the data these edge devices were producing.

As time went on, however, we saw that Kubernetes was good for IoT edge workloads as well as workloads that ran across a widespread area.

Stacks of Kubernetes are now popping up in more places where remote office and branch office stacks – such as banks and retail stores – were traditionally designed to process local data live.

I dove into this more in a blog written for KubeCon, but in short the edge is no longer just for IoT, and fleet management is a critical capability for any Kubernetes management stack.

Containers and VMs

As Kubernetes continues to grow and become a core part of any IT infrastructure, operators are increasingly asking how to manage VMs and containers together. Splitting these into separate stacks is wasteful. It makes little sense to double up on effort and hardware to support both when they are basically doing the same thing.

With this growth, it’s become clear that any modern infrastructure needs to manage both. Over the next year we plan to dive deeper into this, and we’ll be excited to share our findings with you.

Challenges Getting Started

Many operators are stuck at the first step and others are unsure where to start. With so many options and choices, getting a handle on the landscape can take a long time. And with the rapid pace of innovation, by the time you understand it there’s a new crop of projects to investigate.

Helping customers navigate this landscape is the critical task of any infrastructure provider. There may be pitfalls, too. The farther a solution moves away from vanilla Kubernetes, potentially it will take longer to deliver the latest open source innovations to customers or make it nearly impossible to change components of the platform if customer needs evolve.

The best solutions stick as close as possible to upstream Kubernetes. This ensures that the customer always has the right tool for the job.

Learn more about Nutanix Kubernetes Platform

We designed the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) to help with each of these challenges and more. NKP is a complete, enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform that is fast and easy to deploy and enables organizations to accelerate their application development.

NKP provides automated lifecycle management for the entire Kubernetes stack, and integrates seamlessly with the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) for comprehensive scale-out data services.

Learn more about NKP or try it for yourself with a free test drive today.