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Canonical has conducted surveys about Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations in the past two years. As a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and an active part of the community, we contribute the anonymised results back, along with our analyses and the insights of industry experts. Everyone can submit an answer anonymously. Respondents only need to provide their contact address when participating in a gift raffle. The reports for 2021 and 2022 are freely available to everyone. We have also just opened our survey for 2023 at KubeCon NA 2023, so if you want to have your say and contribute insights for the cloud-native community, now’s your chance! Take the survey during the week of KubeCon NA 2023! A survey in the clouds, Salvador Dali style, the author has told an AI to paint this. Looking back the past two years With two surveys completed, we can also observe year-to-year changes. Let’s compare some key observations from the last two years. From Kubernetes setup to CI/CD pipelining and re-architecting While in 2021, most people (34%) said they were working on deploying Kubernetes as a service, this dropped to 10% in 2022. This year, most people responded that they were re-architecting a solution for Kubernetes, deploying a CI/CD pipeline or moving to an OSS solution. We can see that more and more organisations have transitioned into the next step of Kubernetes adoption. Security remains the most relevant selection criteria for base container images. The importance of security is not a big surprise, as we have seen many high-impact vulnerabilities reported in mainstream media. Security for container base images was ranked highest for about 55% of people in both years. The second most important qualities were stability and compliance in 2021 and 2022 respectively, ranked in second place by less than 40% of respondents. Despite all the initiatives, tools, solutions and technologies, the security community did not finish to make vulnerabilities and malware less critical and less of a concern for Kubernetes users. More efforts are required than what is available today to cover security sustainably. Kubernetes environments are stable Having almost the same answers in two consecutive survey years does not sound remarkable. However, it is striking that the percentage of people using AWS and Azure remained nearly the same. This is an important observation: once a setup is made, it is stable and leads to almost zero observable movements. The constant share of about 15% for OpenStack as a Kubernetes platform in both years confirms this observation: OpenStack is not dead. Lack of skills remains #1 problem Again, similar results, but a critical message: Every second person has seen in 2021 and 2022 lack of skills as the #1 challenge for Kubernetes adoption. And more than every third person has seen their organisation’s structure as the second most significant problem in both years. Having the same result for two years confirms a sustained demand for consulting and know-how to help organisations adopt Kubernetes. Organisations have evolved to the application level but challenges remain Comparing the results from two consecutive years shows that organisations went one step further from the deployment and setup of a Kubernetes environment to re-architecting their applications and automating their infrastructure. However, there are strikingly similar results over the last two years: security remains the most important thing to look at, confirming that several issues have not been solved yet. Access to talent remains an issue, providing opportunities for vendors and companies to fill the gap. Our 2023 survey is open! We’re now running the third edition of this survey for 2023! If you find this helpful and want to contribute to the 2023 report, you can support it now! The survey is open, so be part of the community and contribute to the freely available results for everyone (responses are kept anonymous): View the full article

Released today, data from more than 1,300 global respondents combines with expert analysis to reveal goals, benefits, and challenges of cloud-native technology in 2022 83% of respondents are using either hybrid or multi-cloud 38% see security as the biggest concern Nearly 50% say lack of in-house skills and limited manpower are the biggest obstacles to migrating to or using Kubernetes and containers 16 May 2022 – Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, today released data from a new global survey revealing the goals, benefits, and challenges of cloud-native technologies. The second annual Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations report has surveyed more than 1,300 IT professionals over the last year about their usage of Kubernetes, bare metal, VMs, containers, and serverless applications. The report also includes insights gathered by Canonical from experts at AWS, Google, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Microsoft, WeaveWorks, and others. According to the survey, Kubernetes and cloud native technologies unlock innovation for organisations and allow them to achieve their goals. But the benefits of cloud native technologies vary, depending on their usage and the maturity of the organisations using them, with elasticity and agility, resource optimisation and reduced service costs identified as the top benefits, and security the most important consideration. Key Survey Findings and Expert Opinions 83% of respondents are using either hybrid or multi-cloud. In the last year alone, the percentage of respondents who did not use hybrid or multi-cloud dropped from 22.4% to 16.4%. Tim Hockin, principal software engineer at Google, discusses the reality behind that adoption: “People often build a straw man of hybrid or multi-cloud, with the idea of one giant mesh that spans the world and all the clouds, applications running wherever capacity is cheap and available. But in reality, that’s not at all what people are doing with it. What they’re actually doing is using each environment for just the things they have to use it for.” Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, said of the increasing growth of hybrid cloud in the enterprise: “The key question is: how much of what you do every day can you do on multiple different clouds without thinking about it? For me, the sensible thing for a medium or large institution is to have a fully automated private cloud and also relationships with at least two public cloud providers. This way, businesses essentially benchmark themselves on doing any given operation on the private cloud and on the two public clouds.” 14% of respondents said that they run everything on Kubernetes, over 20% said on bare metal and VMs, and over 29% said a combination of bare metal, VMs, and Kubernetes. This distribution shows how the flexibility of Kubernetes allows organisations to run the same type of workloads everywhere. Looking back at last year’s highlight, where Kelsey Hightower stated that bare metal was a better choice for compute and resource-heavy use cases such as interactive machine learning jobs, it seems that the tune is changing. Actually, as running Kubernetes is becoming more accessible, Alexis Richardson speculates that organisations would further adopt Kubernetes on bare metal if they knew it was possible. 38% of respondents suggest that security is the most important consideration, whether operating Kubernetes, building container images, or defining an edge strategy. Keeping clusters up-to-date is a definitive best practice to solve security issues. However, according to Jose Miguel Parrella, principal architect at Microsoft, it is not as embedded within IT infrastructure strategy as one could expect. Today, it is more of a Day-30 discussion that only occurs within the small team of Kubernetes maintainers of every organisation. Combined with the fact that only 13.5% of people reported that they have “mastered” security in the cloud native space, it is clear that organisations have some room to grow when it comes to properly adopting and managing Kubernetes in production. Nearly 50% of respondents reported that lack of in-house skills and limited manpower were the biggest challenges when migrating to or using Kubernetes and containers. Ken Sipe, senior enterprise architect and co-chair of the Operator SDK, comments: “When people mention the lack of skill as a blocker, the truth is that they are often already in an environment where they are ready to do the next thing but don’t have the infrastructural or organisational support to do so. It is also a matter of buy versus build: when buying a solution and associated service, an organisation benefits from leveraging external resources and skillsets without having to build the capability in-house. When building it in house, the organisation can benefit from implementing its engineering discipline, which could be a useful differentiator.” To view the full report, click here. “The growth in Kubernetes and cloud-native technology shows no signs of stopping, so it’s vital that we understand the experience, and the concerns, of developers and users,” said David Booth, VP of Cloud Native Operations at Canonical. “This survey, and initiatives like the Canonical Operator Day at KubeCon this year, are ways for us not just to understand the needs of the enterprise ourselves, but to help increase the general understanding of this constantly evolving space.” About Canonical Canonical is behind Ubuntu, the leading OS for container, cloud, and hyperscale computing. Most public cloud workloads use Ubuntu, as do most new smart gateways, switches, self-driving cars, and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support, and services to commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, Canonical is a privately held company. Contact Daniel Griffiths, Global Director of Communications pr@canonical.com View the full article