Navigating the Cloud Native Revolution: Insights for IT Leaders
Earlier in our career, Tiffany and I were dropped in the middle of the “Container Wars,” facing dozens of new entrants to the space every month. We both chose the company because we knew they were part of the movement toward cloud-native microservices . They were well-positioned as an early innovator, and this late stage cloud and data infrastructure startup had raised more than $250 million from top tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.
At this time in the 2010s, Docker was a unicorn taking the startup world by storm, with every big tech company, from VMware to IBM, looking to jump on the container and, later, the Kubernetes bandwagon. This led to a period of fierce market consolidation with everyone competing to have the loudest voice in the room.
Enter Kubernetes. With technology preferences trending in a new direction, the company was at risk of getting left behind in a crowded market. Working together, Tiffany and I created a full-stack marketing program that become a self-enforcing flywheel where paid traffic was further fueled by strong brand awareness and a personalized content funnel.
While product worked on integrating Kubernetes into our strategy, we bridged the messaging gap, telling thought leadership stories that honored our legacy product, while speaking to the bright future of Kubernetes.
It was one of the first time in my career where I got to be part of a revenue team putting up 6-digit numbers. And while the Container Wars may have been a little hectic, it was an amazing time to watch the speed of innovation and the sometimes cutthroat nature of the technology industry. I'll never forget when The Information scooped our news, and we had to publish the same day. We had a pretty dang good team to pull that off a week ahead of schedule.
Now, Kubernetes has won the war, but it's come with a whole new ecosystem of tools to make it less complex and more usable. It makes me wonder what will be next? Is it simply AI-optimized infrastructure management? Or will there be a new format to change everything?
