Survey Surfaces Mass Migration to Cloud-Native Applications
A survey of 1,500 IT, DevOps and platform engineering decision-makers published today finds nearly all (98%) of respondents are working for organizations that have encapsulated some of their applications in containers, with more than half (54%) reporting that all their applications are based on containers. Only 27% said that they were only using those platforms to build and deploy new applications.
Conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Nutanix, the survey, however, also finds 81% of respondents feel the IT infrastructure relied on to run those applications requires improvement. Nearly all respondents are already using Kubernetes to run container applications, with 78% using more than two or more different distributions.
Not surprisingly, nearly two-thirds (64%) also noted that cloud-native and container application development remains challenging, and well over a third (36%) admit their IT teams still may not have all the skills required.
Lee Caswell, senior vice president for product and solutions marketing for Nutanix, said those issues are likely to be further exacerbated as organizations start to build generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications that will mostly be built using containers that will run on Kubernetes clusters.
The survey finds that 80% of respondents work for organizations that have a generative AI strategy, and a full 98% are already encountering challenges when trying to scale these applications. A total of 70% said their generative AI applications are already running in containers, but more than half (54%) also noted their organization will need to improve their current IT infrastructure to run AI applications.
The top two challenges for running these workloads are data privacy/security concerns (38%) followed by a lack of expertise (31%).
The issue that IT organizations will ultimately need to determine is how many platforms are they going to be willing to support, said Caswell. Most IT teams would prefer to standardize on a single platform to run both cloud-native and legacy monolithic applications, he noted.
It’s not clear how many organizations have standardized on a single platform to run multiple classes of applications. Nutanix has been making a case for an integrated platform, that in addition to embedding Kubernetes alongside virtual machines also includes integrated data management tools. That approach simplifies the management of IT environments in a way that also reduces costs, regardless of whether applications are deployed in an on-premise or cloud computing environment, said Caswell.
More IT teams might be moving in that general direction with the rise of platform engineering as a methodology for managing the deployment of applications at scale, but many independent teams are managing cloud-native applications that run on platforms dedicated to that specific purpose.
The one certain thing is the total percentage of applications that are based on cloud-native technologies is only going to steadily increase. As such, IT teams will eventually need to determine what type of platform provides the most amount of flexibility. After all, legacy monolithic applications are not likely to disappear any time soon. If anything they are likely to be encapsulated in containers to eliminate the possibility of being locked into a specific platform. The issue, as always, is simply finding the tools and expertise needed to manage those applications in a new and very different type of IT environment.
