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Cloud has become synonymous with enterprise IT, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Though enterprises now spend roughly $545 billion annually on cloud infrastructure, according to IDC, and 41% of that spend goes to the top five cloud providers, the reality is that a substantial amount of money, even “cloud” money, isn’t being spent with the big hyperscalers.

Instead, it’s being plowed into other companies pitching Kubernetes and associated infrastructure. “Open and approachable” may define the future of the $500 billion cloud infrastructure market.

If you want to see the future of enterprise IT, you’d do well to pay attention to this week’s KubeCon in Chicago. As has been the case for years, open source is driving the future of enterprise infrastructure, with projects such as eBPF/Cilium, Tetragon, and OpenTelemetry playing major roles. But it’s not just about open access to code. If anything, these projects may benefit more from how they make difficult domains accessible to mere mortals.