CNCF: Rise in Emerging Open Source Tech on K8s
A new report from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in collaboration with Datadog, New Relic and Slashdata finds a wider range of emerging open source technologies are being deployed on top of Kubernetes.
The report, based on a global survey of 3,829 IT professionals, finds 96% of respondents are now either using or evaluating Kubernetes. Approximately 79% of respondents use some form of certified Kubernetes instance that is provided as a managed service, with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (39%), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (23%) and Azure Kubernetes Engine (17%) being the most consumed. At the same time, the CNCF reports that use of the containerd runtime as an alternative to Docker grew 500% year-over-year.
Although the base of adoption for other cloud-native technologies is much smaller than Kubernetes itself, the CNCF report also notes the adoption of Envoy proxy software increased 39% year-over-year while use of the Fluentd data collector and Prometheus monitoring software grew 53% and 43%, respectively.
The report also finds adoption of serverless computing platforms remains steady at 39% year-over-year. Much like Kubernetes, those platforms are being consumed mainly as managed services, with 75% of respondents that use these platforms saying they consume them via a managed service, a 24% increase year-over-year. The most widely used serverless computing frameworks are AWS Lambda (74%) and Azure Functions (39%).
Priyanka Sharma, executive director of the CNCF, says it’s clear Kubernetes has reached a level of mainstream adoption. The challenge now is determining what other complementary technologies should be adopted to further advance the adoption of cloud-native applications based on containers and Kubernetes, she adds.
In general, open source technologies are now driving the next era of IT innovation. Rather than individually building proprietary IT infrastructure platforms, it’s apparent IT vendors are pooling their resources and expertise to advance open source platforms such as Kubernetes. Less clear is precisely how sustainable that model is from an economic perspective as more IT vendors shift toward providing managed services based on curated instances of open source software. One way or another, however, open source technologies are becoming, in many cases, de facto standards.
Of course, in recent months the security of those platforms has become a subject of concern. In some instances, there are not enough maintainers and contributors to smaller open source projects to ensure they are secure. Most recently, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a sister CNCF consortium, launched an Alpha-Omega Project to improve the security of open source software using a $5 million initial investment provided by Microsoft and Google. It may take a while for those efforts to bear fruit, but the existence of security issues is not likely to reduce the reliance on open source software that, on the whole, reduces the total cost of IT for most organizations.
In the meantime, as the rate of Kubernetes adoption continues to grow it’s clear that a wide range of other open source technologies will soon follow.
