Canonical survey on the adaptation of cloud-native technologies “Cloud Native” strategies still in the beginning
21.07.2021 Editor:
Ulrike Ostler
Cloud native technologies are growing in popularity, but they still have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to full enterprise adoption. After all, 85 percent of companies have not yet fully adopted Kubernetes and cloud native, according to a global industry survey by Canonical.
Companies on the topic
Canonical, founded in 2004 and privately owned, is the publisher of Ubuntu, the operating system for most public cloud workloads. If you want, you can still participate in the company’s survey on Cloud Native.
(Image: kropekk_pl on Pixabay)
The Canonical survey is based on data from 1,200 respondents and assessments from seven industry experts, showing rapid growth and some growing pains. Despite a high speed in the adoption of the technologies, there is still a large gap to be filled until their complete integration into corporate IT.
The Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations Report surveyed participants on more than 40 topics about their use of Kubernetes, bare metal, VMs, containers, and serverless applications. The report also includes assessments from experts from Amazon, Google, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Weaveworks, Cloudbees, and HCL Technologies that Canonical brought together to evaluate the results.
The survey shows the complexity of today’s cloud-native technology landscape: Although 45.6 percent of respondents say they use Kubernetes in production, only 15.7 percent use Kubernetes exclusively.
Nearly 30 percent run applications in a mix of bare metal, VMs, and Kubernetes, 15.3 percent do so primarily on VMs and plan to migrate to Kubernetes entirely, and 13.1 percent work with VMs and evaluate Kubernetes for use. James Strachan, Distinguished Engineer at Cloudbees: “The results show that we still have a long way to go before we have properly modernized the infrastructure.”
Nearly 78 percent of respondents reported at least one hybrid or multicloud use case in production at their company. That number is likely higher than the number when teams consider third – party SaaS or managed services-that is, those that go beyond what they directly manage themselves.
The increasing adoption of hybrid and multicloud solutions is creating new challenges, especially in the management of various bare metal, VM and Kubernetes technologies, according to another result of the survey. Operations is seen as the next big challenge, with companies aiming for automation through application management rather than configuration management. For this purpose, almost 30 percent put trying out operators on the to-do list, another 17 percent are already experimenting with them and 14 percent use them in production.
Further results:
- The top users of Kubernetes and cloud native technologies are SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and DevOps engineers, followed by infrastructure architects, backend developers and full stack developers.
- The most important goals when using Kubernetes and cloud – native technologies are improved maintenance, monitoring and automation (cited by 64.6 percent of users), infrastructure modernization (46.4 percent) and faster time-to-market (26.5 percent).
- When asked what they consider to be the most valuable features of these technologies, respondents cited innovative features, developer productivity, elasticity and agility, global reach, open source, portability, reduced operating costs (opex) and capex, resource optimization, and simpler operations.
- The most common use cases for hybrid and multicloud are accelerating development and increasing automation (20.7 percent of respondents), expanding cloud backup options to reduce costs (13.3 percent), disaster recovery (12.6 percent), and clustering of mission-critical databases (5.5 percent).
What are the biggest challenges of Kubernetes for companies?
- For 54.5 percent of respondents, it is the internal lack of appropriate qualifications.
- This is followed by the company’s IT infrastructure (37.3 percent),
- Incompatibility with legacy systems (32.6 percent),
- Difficulties in training users (29.7 percent),
- Security and compliance concerns (24.7 percent) and
- the integration of cloud-native applications with each other (19 percent).
“They do not realize that they already have a large part of the necessary qualifications. In fact, these were not created for and with Kubernetes. These are merely new terms used for older concepts. Many people lack confidence because they believe that the fundamentals have somehow changed,” comments Kelsey Hightower, a developer advocate at Google, on the concerns about internal qualifications.
Alexis Richardson, founder and CEO of Weaveworks, adds: “If people are concerned about the fundamentals, i.e. security, cost, resources, observability and configuration, that is an indication that they have not yet bridged the gap to full enterprise adoption.“
Jokingly
22.5 Percent of respondents said that making coffee is the only thing they would like to do with K8s and currently can’t. Eleven percent said ” I can do anything I need with Kubernetes, “an attitude Richardson humorously referred to as” Kubris.”
David Booth, VP of Cloud Native Applications at Canonical, summarizes: “The report vividly shows how cloud native technologies and the communities around them are growing and delivering business value, but also where there is still room for growth.”As an active part of the community, Canonical shares these insights, leveraging both the massive Ubuntu user base and our experience working with open source software and complex enterprise environments.
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