Data released today from more than 1,300 respondents worldwide was combined with expert analysis to reveal the goals, benefits and challenges of cloud-native technology in 2022. […]
Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, presents the results of a new global survey on the goals, benefits and challenges of cloud-native technologies. Last year's second annual Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations Report surveyed more than 1,300 IT professionals on how they use Kubernetes, bare metal, VMs, containers and serverless applications. The report also includes statements Canonical received from experts at AWS, Google, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Microsoft, WeaveWorks and others.
83 percent of respondents use a hybrid or multi-cloud38 percent cite security as their top concernNearly 50 percent cite a lack of skills and limited manpower as the top barriers to moving to or using Kubernetes and containers
Key survey results and expert opinions
83% of respondents use either hybrid or multi-cloud environments. In the last year alone, the percentage of respondents not using hybrid or multi-cloud has dropped from 22.4% to 16.4%.
Tim Hockin, Principal Software Engineer at Google, looks at the facts behind the numbers: “People often build a construct of hybrid or multi-cloud, coupled with the idea of a vast web spanning the world and all clouds, where Applications run where capacity is cheap and available. But in reality, that's not what people do with it at all. In reality, they only use each environment for the things they need it for.”
Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, ranks the growth of hybrid cloud in enterprises: “The key question is: How much of what you do every day can you do on multiple different clouds without thinking about it? In my opinion, it makes sense for a medium or large enterprise to have a fully automated private cloud and relationships with at least two public cloud providers. In this way, companies can essentially measure themselves against whether they can perform any operation in the private cloud and in the two public clouds.”
14% of respondents reported running everything on Kubernetes, over 20% on bare metal and VMs, and over 29% on a combination of bare metal, VMs and Kubernetes. This distribution shows how organizations can run the same type of workloads anywhere, thanks to the flexibility of Kubernetes. A look back at last year's highlight shows that the mood is changing.
38% of respondents say security is the most important consideration for them, whether it's running Kubernetes, building container images, or defining an edge strategy. Keeping clusters up to date is definitely a best practice for solving security issues. However, according to Jose Miguel Parrella, principal architect at Microsoft, this is not as embedded in the IT infrastructure strategy as one might expect. Nowadays, only smaller teams of Kubernetes engineers in each company discuss this.
Combine this with the fact that only 13.5% of respondents said they "mastered" cloud native security, and it's clear that organizations still have some work to do to properly adopt and manage Kubernetes in production .
For almost 50% of respondents, a lack of in-house expertise and limited manpower are the top challenges when migrating to or using Kubernetes and containers. Ken Sipe, Senior Enterprise Architect and Co-Chair of the Operator SDK, comments: "When respondents cite a lack of know-how as a barrier, the truth is often that they are already in an environment where they are ready to to do the next thing but don't have the infrastructural or organizational support to do it.
