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Spectro Cloud Survey Surfaces Kubernetes Challenges

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by Mike Vizard

A survey published today of 167 IT executives finds that while 77% of respondents have been working with Kubernetes clusters in some form for the past two years, only 40% have deployed them in a production environment. Just under a quarter of those respondents have deployed Kubernetes clusters in a production environment within the last 12 months.

The survey, conducted by Dimensional Insight on behalf of Spectro Cloud, a provider of a management platform for Kubernetes clusters, polled organizations with more than 500 employees. More than half (55%) reported that less than half of the Kubernetes clusters they have provisioned are in a production environment, with just under a quarter (24%) indicating that about half of their clusters are in production. Only 21% said that they currently have more than half of their clusters in production. Only 4% report that Kubernetes is being used as a one-off platform in their organization.

A full 98% of respondents report myriad Kubernetes challenges ranging from implementing consistent management and controls for enterprise environments (49%) to managing multicluster (46%) and heterogeneous multi-cloud environments (42%). These are followed by challenges with integrating required services (41%), managing security (41%) and meeting compliance requirements due to configuration drift (34%), managing the needs of one-off use cases such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) or GPU support (33%) and scaling to large environments (24%).

More than three-quarters (77%) of respondents said that being able to run diverse Kubernetes stacks across different environments is vital but that it also makes it harder to manage those clusters. Two-thirds (66%) said they do not believe they can have both flexibility and usability in a Kubernetes environment.

In addition, survey respondents are split in terms of best practices for cluster deployments, with more half 54% preferring to run a larger number of small clusters. Well over one-third (38%) prefer to run multiple applications on a small number of larger clusters (38%). Among respondents with more than 20 Kubernetes clusters, there is a marked preference for multi-tenant environments (70%).

Spectro Cloud CEO Tenry Fu says that as Kubernetes adoption continues to mature he expects to see more bare-metal deployments of Kubernetes as part of an effort to both improve performance and reduce costs by eliminating virtual machine licenses. The number of organizations that will be deploying a service mesh on top of multiple Kubernetes clusters to manage east-west traffic will also increase in the months ahead, he adds.

In addition, as the number of clusters continues to grow, it’s only a matter of time before more organizations rely on a management framework that makes it possible to manage larger numbers of Kubernetes clusters at a higher level of abstraction.

The decision to deploy Kubernetes is equally likely to have been driven by application developers (47%) as IT operations (49%), the survey shows. The primary owner of production Kubernetes deployments is mostly likely IT operations (50%) or DevOps (25%). DevOps and site reliability engineers (SREs) are more likely to have ownership in larger environments, the survey notes. Nearly two-thirds (63%), however, said IT operations took ownership with five or fewer Kubernetes clusters. When IT operations teams own Kubernetes, it’s typically because of security (64%), technology maturity (61%) or compliance (50%); a specific number of clusters (21%) and users (19%).

When asked more broadly, the Spectro Cloud survey finds ownership of Kubernetes clusters spans IT operations and infrastructure (78%), DevOps (62%), development (47%), SREs (16%) and line of business (10%). More than three-quarters (77%) have standardized on a corporate Kubernetes platform, but nearly half (48%) also have Kubernetes clusters that the primary owner does not manage.

The management of Kubernetes clusters as they continue to evolve is clearly a team sport. It’s not clear if that will be the case forever, but for now, at least, it seems it takes a proverbial IT village to maintain a Kubernetes environment.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a veteran IT journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the technology industry, having previously served as Editor-in-Chief of both CRN and InfoWorld and as editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he oversaw titles including eWEEK, CIO Insight and Baseline. Over his career he has also edited or contributed to a wide range of enterprise technology publications, including IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, ComputerWorld, TMCNet and Digital Review, and he later led editorial for CTOEdge.com. His reporting and analysis span software development, cloud computing, cybersecurity, IT channel strategy and, more recently, artificial intelligence and DevOps practices. A recognized voice in enterprise IT journalism, Vizard is known for tracking emerging technology trends as they move from early adoption into mainstream enterprise use. He now serves as Chief Content Officer for Techstrong Group, where he oversees editorial strategy across the full network — DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Digital CxO, Techstrong.ai, TechStrong.IT, Techstrong Semi and PlatformEngineering.com — in addition to writing and hosting content for Techstrong TV and the Techstrong Gang podcast.

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