Survey Surfaces Steady Pace of Investment in Cloud-Native App Development
A survey of 504 DevOps practitioners finds roughly 60% work for organizations making significant investments in container and orchestration technologies over the next two years.
Conducted by Techstrong Research, an arm of Techstrong Group, the survey finds that 20% will be making significant investments in these areas compared to 40% and 38% making modest investments in containers and orchestration technologies, respectively.
Overall, well over half of respondents work for organizations that have already deployed cloud-native applications in a production environment, with another 22% now evaluating whether to follow suit, the survey finds.
Mitch Ashley, principal analyst for Techstrong Research, said cloud-native applications built using containers and microservices are inextricably linked to DevOps workflows. The development, testing, deployment and updating of hundreds or thousands of microservices in modern-day applications would be virtually impossible without DevOps pipelines that make it possible to manage multiple workstreams in parallel throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC), he noted.
The survey finds that in addition to embracing DevOps, well over half of respondents (57%) work for organizations that have specifically adopted GitOps as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows.
Cloud-native applications, of course, come in many shapes and sizes. Many developers still only use containers to build applications that can run anywhere. More advanced developers use platforms such as Kubernetes to orchestrate those containers in a way that makes it simpler to scale up and down the consumption of IT infrastructure resources. Alternatively, some developers prefer to make use of serverless computing frameworks to provide an even higher level of abstraction for building and deploying cloud-native applications.
In addition, the size of the containers being used to build microservices has continued to evolve. Given the inherent complexity of managing microservices-based applications, many organizations are encapsulating much larger segments of code that they manage as a set of mini-monoliths of code. That more flexible approach to application development has made the fierce debate over whether it is better to employ microservices versus continuing to build monolithic applications much less relevant than it once was.
Regardless of approach, the way applications are being built and deployed across hybrid IT environments has evolved. The challenge now is making it as simple as possible for application developers to build and maintain cloud-native applications. There are millions of developers capable of building these applications. However, the bulk of the application development community because of complexity has yet to fully embrace cloud-native application development platforms such as Kubernetes.
Hopefully, there will come a day when advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will make it simpler to build cloud-native applications. In the meantime, increasing the productivity of developers of cloud-native applications is critical. There is only so much application development expertise available. If application developers are spending a lot of time not only building microservices but also updating and managing them, there are only so many of them they can build and maintain. The challenge, as always, is making it simpler to build cloud-native applications at a level of scale the typical DevOps team can manage.
For more information, download a copy of the DevOps Next report here.
