I have to say I find projects that talk about generic concepts (observability, tracing, eBPF), but then when you dig in the docs it's 100% Kubernetes-specific, to be highly misleading. Not everyone uses Kubernetes, and distributed tracing is a good thing to have regardless of the underlying platform.
Yeah, no. Cloud-native used to mean something even before Kubernetes became mainstream, and technically the CNCF isn't about Kubernetes only, which is why KubeCon and CloudNativeCon are separate events (held together, but separate). Just going to their website shows me two case studies, one is around Kubernetes (Spotify), the other around Vitess (Slack) and has nothing to do with k8s.
If you remove Kubernetes which is way more popular and hiding the numbers of cloud-native, you'll see that cloud-native started being talked about around 2011, with steady small growth untill it explodes alongside Kubernetes later on.
I recall hearing cloud native compared to lift and shift regarding migrating to AWS ~2012-2013.
