I’ve just been in Sydney for a couple of days for CloudCon 2025. I think depending on how you count this is my third one of these events — the event has changed names at least twice, so its actually a little hard to work out the lineage of the event. This year’s conference was noticeably smaller than last years which is confusing to me for an event which is so competitively priced and branded so heavily with the hot topics dejour. That said the event was well run, in a good venue, and well worth the time. That is, this event really deserves more support than its getting.
There were some clear themes from the event for me:
- ClickHouse is cool. Or at least I think so. ClickHouse observability certainly has potential, but I think the underlying SQL database is actually the most interesting bit. ClickHouse is also investing heavily in the Australian market right now, so I suspect they’re seeing strong traction here.
- No one talks about “devops” any more, because its become a meaningless term where everything is devops if you squint at it right. Instead people are using the term “platform engineering”, which doesn’t appear to have a particularly clear definition either.
- OpenTelemetry is definitely a thing. I think literally every talk on the first day mentioned it.
- There are a lot of people who want to do AI, but there does not seem to be a lot of success out there right now. The speakers now openly admit that at least 40% of AI projects will fail. Would Ed Zitron please step up to the blog?
- If anyone mentions “MCP” one more time… Also, what is MCP? Its weird that no one seems to want to define it when there’s a very clear definition out there if you google it.
- Everyone seems to now agree that Kubernetes is too complicated and that the complexity drives cost management problems. There is no talk of actually simplifying the ecosystem however.
So in summary, well done to the event organizers. I hope more punters get on board in the future.