7 min read

December 2025

A nighttime photo of London buildings lit up with Christmas lights.
Happy holidays!

👋 Intro

Welcome to the December edition of CloudNative.Now - a monthly newsletter that covers all that has been happening in the cloud native world in the past month!

Can you believe it's been a whole year of this newsletter?! 🤯 The time has flown by. If you missed any months, you can always catch up from the archive.

I was originally expecting this issue to be mostly a look back on the past year, anticipating not much happening this month due to the holiday period and general end-of-year slowdown. But it seems that doesn't slow down the cloud native community! 🚀 There has been plenty going on this month from new Kubernetes releases to several open CFPs and a sprinkling of articles around some serious downtime recently.

I hope you've all had a wonderful holiday, whether you celebrate or not, and I wish each and every one of you a truly fantastic new year. 💙 Here's hoping 2026 bring you all everything you want! 🎆

As always, you’re invited to subscribe to the email newsletter or add the RSS feed to your favourite feed reader to make sure you don’t miss anything! And please help to spread the word and recommend this to your friends and network if you find the content useful! 💙

If you have any feedback or have any links you’d like to suggest please reach out on Bluesky or Mastodon! 💬

📰 News & Articles

  • Three Core Principles for Sustainable Platform Design  - Abby Bangser
    Many platforms solve today's problems but don’t scale. Move beyond simple tools to build platforms that pass key value tests and support long-term growth.
  • Announcing Amazon EKS Capabilities for workload orchestration and cloud resource management - Channy Yun
    Big news for EKS users! New EKS Capabilities make EKS cluster more production-ready from day one by providing managed functionality to handle cluster operations. Available at launch: Argo CD, AWS Controllers for Kubernetes and Kube Resource Orchestrator.
  • Introducing the Technology Matrix - Rawkode
    Your new compass for the Cloud Native landscape. Explore, filter, and learn about the technologies that power modern platforms.
    I really like what David is trying to do here and think the Technology Matrix is really well presented with some clear categorization. Think a much less overwhelming CNCF Landscape, with some opinionated choice added in to help differentiate between the options.
  • Canonical Extends Kubernetes Long-Term Support to 15 Years - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
    I'm not really sure who this is for exactly but if you do want to run the same Kubernetes for 15 years I guess Canonical have you covered.
  • Announcement: Checkpoint/Restore WG is here! - Viktória Spišaková
    A new Kubernetes working group has been set up to discuss and advance checkpoint restore. If that's something you're interested in or are able to help out with please consider joining the working group.
  • How when AWS was down, we were not - Warren Parad
    Nothing can have an unlimited uptime. But even when AWS and other hyperscalers are having incidents, Authress created an architecture that is resilient to those outages. This article covers how they've managed to achieve that and avoid being impacted when many others were.
  • Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025 - Dane Knecht
    Cloudflare experienced a significant traffic outage on December 5, 2025, starting approximately at 8:47 UTC. The incident lasted approximately 25 minutes before resolution. This is Cloudflare's write up of what happened and how they are improving things.
  • How the Team Behind Valkey Knew It Was Time to Fork - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
    Lessons from the Valkey team on breaking away from a company that wants to close your open source project.
  • Hardened Images for Everyone - Christian Dupuis & Michael Donovan
    Docker has released Docker Hardened Images that are now free to use, share, and build on with no licensing surprises.
  • New Features We Find Exciting in the Kubernetes 1.35 Release - Arsh Sharma
    The folks at Metalbear share some of their favourite new features from the Kubernetes 1.35 release.
    Read more about this release and its various new features in the Tools section below. 👇
  • What's Wrong with Kubernetes Today - Debo Ray
    A look at how Kubernetes fails to effectively scale without waste. Covers various bin packing approaches and tools used in Kubernetes today and how they work and where they fall short.
  • It works on my cluster: a tale of two troubleshooters - Liam Mackie
    Kubernetes is hard to troubleshoot. Learn how two teams worked together to troubleshoot a particularly tricky bug.

🔒 Security

🧑‍🏫 Tutorials, Videos & Podcasts

🧰 Tools

🎤 Events and CFPs

Events

  • 🇬🇧 ContainerDays London 2026 - 11th - 12th February, 2026
    ContainerDays is coming to the UK for the first time next year and tickets are now available. I'm going to be giving two talks here! 🤯
    If you're looking to grab a ticket, take a look at the ContainerDays LinkedIn account where they've been giving away some free tickets over the holidays. If you're quick you might still be able to grab one! 😉
  • 🇳🇱 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Amsterdam - 23 → 26 March
    KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is going back to Amsterdam!
    On a personal note, this will be the first time that I'm speaking there! 😮 Very excited about that!
    Get 15% off ticket prices with code: KCEU26ABSH15
  • 🇯🇵 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan - 29 → 30 July
    KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is going back to Japan. This time in Yokohama!

CFPs

💬 Social Post of the Month

Bluesky post from James Strong with the following text: "Happy git birthday @cilium.io!" followed by a screenshot of the first git commit of Cilium
10 years of Cilium! 😮

🤷 Misc & Fun

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That's all for this month!
Thank you for reading! 💙

If you enjoyed this post, please spread the word and share with your friends.

~ Marcus 👋