Survey Shows Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry Synergies

December 23, 2020 Mike Vizard CFF, Cloud Foundry, kubernetes, Kubernetes adoption, platform as a service, survey

A survey of 176 IT professionals published this week by the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) finds over two-thirds of respondents (69%) are now running Kubernetes and the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment alongside one another, with well over half (57%) employing the platform in conjunction with Kubernetes. Another 21% of respondents are evaluating Kubernetes.

Survey respondents also report high adoption of open source projects that align with Kubernetes, including the Prometheus monitoring platform (55%), the Istio service mesh and the FluentD data collector.

Chip Childers, executive director for the CFF, says that level of cohabitation of the two platforms validates the decision made to host Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes to create greater operational efficiency for IT organizations.

Among organizations employing Kubernetes, 21% are employing only a managed Kubernetes service, while 37% are only using a self-managed Kubernetes cluster. A total of 42% are employing a mix of both.

Overall, nearly half of respondents (46%) say their organization is currently migrating applications to Cloud Foundry. Another 17% of responses indicate that their organizations were either considering or planning migrations. Only 9% say they are not planning on migrating any additional applications to Cloud Foundry.

The survey finds reliance on Cloud Foundry has a major impact on the rate at which applications can be developed. More than two-thirds of respondents (69%) report they can now develop applications in as quickly as one day to three weeks. That compares to 65% who say it previously would have needed one to six months.

Childers notes that the types of applications being deployed on Cloud Foundry tend to be more complex than other platforms. Nearly half of respondents (47%) say they are deploying mission-critical software on the platform, while 65% are using Cloud Foundry to build either production websites or web services. Three-quarters (75%) are using Cloud Foundry for the development and testing of applications.

There’s also a high correlation between the use of Cloud Foundry and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms, with 70% reporting they employ a CI/CD tool in conjunction with Cloud Foundry. The most widely used CI/CD platforms employed by respondents are Jenkins (63%), Concourse (43%) and Jenkins X (10%).

Well over two-thirds of respondents (69%) of respondents report their development and deployment cycle is three weeks or less, with 44% of all responses indicating they achieve cycle times of six or fewer days. Just less than a quarter (22%) report cycle times of less than one day to develop and deploy applications using Cloud Foundry. That level of cycle time suggests that DevOps processes are fairly mature within organizations that have adopted Cloud Foundry, says Childers.

The top three languages used to build applications on top of Cloud Foundry are Java (76%), JavaScript (64%) and Python (58%). Overall, responses indicate 27 distinct programming languages are being used to build software on Cloud Foundry.

While Kubernetes continues to gain momentum, it’s clear the battle for dominance over what tools and platforms will be employed to build and deploy applications is still in the offing as enterprise IT organizations continue to evaluate all their options.