Key Takeaways from the 2019 Cloud Native State of the Union Speech at CNBPS

On October 24, 2019, the second Cloud Native Technology Practice Summit (CNBPS 2019) concluded in Beijing, featuring a keynote titled “2019 Cloud Native State of the Union” delivered by Lingque Cloud CTO Chen Kai.

Chen emphasized that 2019 marked the year cloud native concepts and technologies became mainstream, turning cloud native into a new normal for enterprises.

The talk highlighted two main topics: the evolving landscape of cloud native infrastructure—especially the maturation of Kubernetes—and how cloud native application architectures can be realized in enterprise IT environments.

He noted that Kubernetes has become the dominant orchestration platform, describing it as “boring” because its core technology is stabilizing, its scope is clearly defined, and innovation is moving to higher‑level stacks. The Kubernetes community focuses on improving stability, extensibility, integrating more technologies into the cloud native stack, and expanding the stack to broader scenarios.

Chen explained that Kubernetes can orchestrate any programmable, API‑driven resource, effectively serving as a development framework for building higher‑level platforms.

The recent ACP 2.0 upgrade from Lingque Cloud fully embraces a Kubernetes‑native architecture, consolidating DevOps and Service Mesh (ASM) into a single Kubernetes‑based platform.

Operators are presented as a key mechanism for automating both complex stateful applications and the underlying infrastructure, with future ACP releases planning to incorporate more Operators for platform automation and third‑party integrations.

Hybrid‑cloud and multi‑cloud deployments are becoming the norm, with Kubernetes acting as a cloud operating system. Technologies such as KubeFed and the Open Service Broker API further facilitate cross‑cloud federation and service integration.

Regarding application architecture, Chen outlined four practical principles for enterprises: (1) not every application needs to be broken into microservices; (2) when microservices are adopted, they must be run on Kubernetes with Service Mesh for governance; (3) APIs are essential for exposing core capabilities even without full microservice refactoring; and (4) API governance should be enforced via layered API gateways.

He described the Alauda Service Mesh (ASM) as an enterprise‑grade solution offering global observability, release management, reliability controls, security, and lifecycle management for services.

Finally, Lingque Cloud introduced the Alauda API Management Platform (AMP) to provide comprehensive API lifecycle management and API economy capabilities, positioning it as the central API gateway for both north‑south and south‑north traffic.

Chen concluded by reflecting on the open‑source movement driving cloud native adoption and thanked the audience.