Spectro Cloud announced the release of its third annual State of Production Kubernetes research report, titled “The New Frontiers of Kubernetes.”
“We explored evolving pain points, ambitions for the future, and attitudes to emerging trends.”
Unique insight into the realities of Kubernetes in enterprise
The research is driven by Spectro Cloud’s ongoing commitment to advancing the cloud native ecosystem, alongside its sponsorship of open source projects such as Kairos.io, and alliances with organizations such as Intel to define new required standards, such as SENA.
This 2023 edition of the report is bigger than ever, based on an extensive survey with 333 Kubernetes practitioners and decision-makers, backed by 10 in-depth interviews to illuminate the data.
The survey was conducted by independent research firm Dimensional Research, ensuring the findings are robust and representative of the realities of those using Kubernetes in production.
“With this research we get deep into what’s on the mind of those who are really working with Kubernetes in production in the enterprise,” says Dave Cope, CRO at Spectro Cloud. “From government CIOs to devops practitioners in retail, we made sure to represent the whole community, and spent time with them to understand how they really feel about Kubernetes and its impact on their organizations.”
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A vantage point in times of change
The 2023 Stage of Production Kubernetes report comes at a time when the Kubernetes industry is undergoing rapid change and evolution, with the growth in edge computing, the acceleration of AI, and a pressing need to modernize Kubernetes management in response to increasing technology scale and complexity.
By exploring these “New Frontiers,” the report will help organizations benchmark themselves, get ready for emerging trends, foster meaningful dialog in the community, and challenge vendors and service providers to help users tackle persistent challenges.
“The survey didn’t just ask respondents to document what tools they use or how big their clusters are,” says Cope. “We explored evolving pain points, ambitions for the future, and attitudes to emerging trends.”
Research highlights
The report reveals that:
Ops teams are increasingly struggling as their Kubernetes environments grow more complex.
- 56% of businesses have more than 10 Kubernetes clusters, and 69% run Kubernetes in multiple clouds or other environments — with 80% expecting their scale to grow.
- 75% say they suffer issues affecting the running of their clusters, up from 66% in 2022. 40% say they lack the skills and headcount to manage Kubernetes.
- Respondents say they spend “too much” time on manual tasks like troubleshooting and patching, driving interest in automation as the #1 way to improve operations.
More needs to be done to support application developers.
- Despite the growth in the concept of platform engineering, 82% say their operations teams still struggle to give developers access to tailored clusters, and 37% say they suffer inconsistencies between dev, staging and production environments.
- While 92% agree that devs should not be managing infrastructure, one in three say that developers today are building their own clusters to deploy applications.
- 62% are actively using or piloting tools designed to help app developers work with Kubernetes.
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Application modernization is a pressing issue for cloud-native organizations.
- While interviewees unanimously told us they were “container first”, all agreed that virtual machines (VMs) are here to stay in their businesses.
- 85% said they were migrating existing VM workloads to Kubernetes, and 86% want to unify containerized and VM workloads on a single infrastructure platform.
Edge computing is strategic and gaining momentum.
- 49% are actively piloting or using Kubernetes in edge computing environments. One in five expect “strong” growth in the coming year.
- Interviewees cited AI as a key driver for edge adoption, with investment in edge expected to improve business processes (50%) and enable new connected solutions (41%).
- Significant challenges face those using edge, particularly security and compliance, field engineering costs and concerns about performing day-2 operations tasks.
“Kubernetes is here to stay, but as the scale of adoption grows, ops teams soon find themselves challenged struggling to support their internal customers while pursuing application modernization strategies and embracing the new opportunities of K8s at the edge,” says Cope. “As the Kubernetes landscape evolves and enterprises push ahead into new frontiers, they are finding their legacy tools are no longer fit for purpose. A new generation of challenges demands a new generation of solutions.”
Inspiring new dialog at KubeCon and beyond
“This is the third time we have published our State of Kubernetes report,” says Tenry Fu, CEO and co-founder of Spectro Cloud. “We believe it’s more important than ever to track the evolving world of Kubernetes and cloud-native, especially as the community gathers in Chicago for KubeCon. Our research findings are vital for informing our discussions as an industry.”
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