At KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2023, discussion focused on the vast ecosystem of projects and vendors that are enabling applications and data to become more distributed and independent from any particular underlying cloud or on-premises infrastructure. With open-source cloud native projects driving more than $4.4 billion in economic impact, generative artificial intelligence now enters the cloud-native conversation in a big way. Additionally, community and vendor innovation focused on compact form factors of Kubernetes such as k3s and k0s.