Cisco, VMware, and SUSE were just some of the big-time vendors that scooped up Kubernetes-focused startups.

VMware’s ravenous appetite for smaller companies continued this year, and we wouldn’t put it past the virtualization giant to ink another deal or two before the ball drops on

The IP-related ban targets China’s SMIC; Dell continues its HCI domination, but HPE gains; and Rancher Labs taps Kubernetes to simplify HCI.

The donation builds on a past commitment and could further smooth over what has been a tense year between the two organizations.

Harvester focuses on the HCI users and doesn't expose users to Kubernetes concepts, Rancher Labs co-founder Sheng Liang explained.

IBM rolled out next-gen encryption; the Linux Foundation debuted its DENT switch; and Cisco confirmed job cuts.

Its greater flexibility is also behind Microsoft’s move toward recommending CAPZ over its legacy AKS Engine product.

Mirantis and Platform9 released their own versions of fully-managed, bare metal orchestration platforms to provide "the best of both worlds."

Nokia CEO touted a reorganization plan for growth; LF Energy targeted power grid virtualization; and the SolarWinds fallout got worse.

The update comes a month after rival VMware launched its own Kubernetes-focused networking update.

“In the coming year, we are going to be super aggressive about Tanzu bundled with vSphere,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said.

SolarWinds was centerstage of the FireEye, US government cyberattack; T-Mobile has gained Kubernetes confidence; and Rakuten defended open RAN.

Cisco bagged Banzai Cloud; Palo Alto Networks paid $670M for Expanse; Cato claimed unicorn status; plus the latest VC/M&A news from November.

“We don't see a lot of reasons not to put everything on Kubernetes at this point," T-Mobile US' Joe Searcy said.

Ericsson slapped Samsung with a patent lawsuit; AWS stuffed Cisco SD-WAN into VPC; and Orca scored a $55 million Series B funding round.

The update also signals the beginning of the end of support for the Dockershim container runtime interface for Docker, which drew considerable attention to mitigate.

Aryaka adds SD-WAN, SASE ideas into a managed VPN; Microsoft, DT expand their cloud collaboration; and the Janssen Project tackles application security.

The Linux Foundation’s latest open source project is a cloud native identity and access management platform that tackles online trust and security.

Nutanix stole VMware's COO; FireEye got poked by a nation-state attack; and Zscaler's CEO said network security is dead.

Firebolt emerged from stealth with a cloud-native data warehouse that builds off of Snowflake's weaknesses: cost, efficiency, and speed.

A tight relationship coupled with compelling silicon helped Arm move beyond low-power electronics and into the data center and hyperscale market.

IBM slashed 10,000 jobs, 20% of its European workforce; plus the latest headcount hirings, promotions, and staff changes from November.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted that around two-thirds of all containers running in the cloud are running on AWS.

Huawei, Juniper Networks, and Cisco were ranked challengers in this year's report.