CNCF Survey Surfaces Steady Pace of Increased Cloud-Native Technology Adoption
A survey of 689 IT professionals published this week by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) finds 80% of respondents work for IT organizations that have deployed Kubernetes in a production environment, with another 13% piloting or actively testing the platform.
Conducted by Linux Foundation Research on behalf of the CNCF, the survey also finds 52% of respondents are using containers to run most or all of their applications, compared to 39% that are using them to run a small number of applications.
Additionally, the survey finds 60% of organizations have now adopted a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to build and deploy most cloud-native applications, representing more than a 31% increase compared to a similar study conducted last year. More than three-quarters (77%) of respondents have to some degree also adopted GitOps as a software engineering methodology, the survey finds.
The most widely used CI/CD platforms are GitHub Actions (51%), Argo (45%), Jenkins (44%), GitLab (34%) and Microsoft Azure Pipelines (24%).
Just under a third (29%) are deploying code multiple times a day, with 38% reporting that 80% to 100% of their releases are automated. Helm is by far the most preferred package manager for Kubernetes (75%), while the other four most used CNCF projects other than Kubernetes are etcd, CoreDNS, Cert Manager and Argo.
Just under a quarter (24%) are now also relying on cloud native technologies to build and deploy all their applications. The average number of containers used by organizations now stands at 2,341, up from 1,140 in 2023. Nearly half (46%) of respondents, however, identified cultural issues as their biggest cultural challenge, followed by CI/CD (40%), lack of training (38%) and security (37%).
Finally, well over half (57%) work for organizations that are now using automated tools to detect vulnerabilities
Hilary Carter, senior vice president for research at the Linux Foundation, said the survey makes it clear that a watershed moment in terms of adoption of cloud-native technologies is now at hand as more organizations modernize their software engineering practices. Much of that activity is in preparation for building next-generation applications infused with artificial intelligence (AI), she added.
At present, 74% of organizations reported using containers to manage stateful applications, but the number of companies planning and/or evaluating future use of containers to manage stateful applications is only 44%, the survey finds. At the same time, however, the number of AI workloads destined for Kubernetes clusters suggests a different class of stateful application will soon become more commonplace in Kubernetes environments, noted Carter.
There is not much consensus when it comes to the platforms used to build and deploy those applications. Survey respondents were evenly split (59%) between on-premises data centers and public clouds (both 59%), with both skewing heavily toward self-managed instances. A managed public cloud was the next most popular choice at 46%, followed by an on-premises private cloud (40%) and a hybrid cloud at 39%. A full 37% of respondents use at least two cloud service providers, up from 34% in 2023, and 26% use three, an increase of 3% from last year, The average number of machines that companies have in their datacenters is 1,269 and only 11% of respondents are making use of serverless computing frameworks.
It’s clear that organizations are relying on cloud-native technologies more than ever. The next challenge, of course, is mastering how to manage them at scale.
