The Results are in … The State of K8s 2018

Earlier this year, Kubernetes celebrated its fourth birthday. While it’s still a very young technology, adoption has been rapid. A number of studies have charted this course, but few have dug deeper to understand what’s driving the momentum.

That’s why we commissioned a third party to poll almost 400 IT decision-makers across practically every sector. We sought to understand who is moving to Kubernetes, what obstacles they have encountered and how they have benefitted from the technology. The results confirmed some of our suspicions, defied others and unwound a few cloud native myths.

Who is adopting Kubernetes?

Kubernetes has crossed the chasm. About 60% of respondents are using Kubernetes today, and 65% expect to be using the technology in the next year. That jives with similar adoption numbers from other studies.

But what caught our attention was the number of organizations running Kubernetes in production. Half of the organizations running Kubernetes are doing so in production. The bigger and more complex the organization, the more likely they’re already in production; 77% of organizations with more than 1,000 developers and 88% of organizations with more than 1,000 containers.

And they’re not just leaning on Kubernetes for stateless apps. 63% are running stateful apps, 53% have entrusted data analytics to the platform and 31% operate IoT apps on Kubernetes.

In short, as we enter 2019 it is abundantly clear that Kubernetes is ready for production workloads.

What obstacles are being encountered?

Now, just because Kubernetes is in wide use doesn’t mean it’s a smooth ride — there are obstacles. The respondents of our study pointed to two prominent pain points: (1) Making early design and deployment decisions with confidence (47%), and (2) Aligning internal teams around common technologies (46%)

One look at the CNCF landscape and it’s easy to see why organizations can struggle to make architectural decisions — it’s a jungle and they need a guide. Our survey showed that respondents seek out multiple sources, from peers to providers to third parties.

As organizations look to build internal cloud native expertise, they are turning to the infrastructure and operations teams to lead. But increasingly we see the emergence of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). While Operations led architectural decisions in 54% of organizations, SRE played that role in 31% of organizations … and 48% of organizations with more than 1,000 developers. Our view is that SRE-Ops will emerge as a key role in large enterprises, functioning like DevOps at scale.

How are organizations benefiting?

So, is it worth it to work through these obstacles? According to our survey respondents, the answer is a resounding yes.

That’s because 63% of organizations that have deployed Kubernetes are immediately using their resources more efficiently. And 58% have shortened their software development cycles. As for the organizations that are specifically using Kubernetes in production, their realization of benefits is nearly ten points higher.

What’s next?

If your organization is peering over the cloud native edge, what should you ready before you make the leap? According to our survey the most wished for capabilities are greater visibility into cluster performance and far simpler backup and recovery. That’s because the number one driver for organizations that have chosen Kubernetes is the ability to orchestrate their efforts across multiple clouds; it’s imperative to have visibility and control across teams and clusters.

When you can see clearly, you can confidently take the next step forward in your cloud native journey.

Download a full copy of the 2018 State of Kubernetes report.