The state of cloud and Kubernetes, according to the CNCF Annual Survey Report.

CNCF Annual Survey Report Review: The state of cloud and Kubernetes

If there’s one thing, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Annual Survey Report made me realize. It’s how far Kubernetes has come in such a short period. “2021: The year Kubernetes bridged the chasm,” adds the deliciously alliterative subtitle.

It’s easy to understand why people are so excited. Whether you interpret the headline as hyperbole, the study is correct, based on real-world quantitative facts. Kubernetes is one of the rarest of technology initiatives: it began as an intriguing concept, evolved into a technological ideal, was executed in a closed setting, and then was released as an open-source goodwill offering. Even though its initial capabilities were lacking, its potential piqued people’s interest. As the CNCF has continued to listen to the community and make tiny but significant improvements, this project has come into its own.

The result is a natural solution to actual problems that are implemented so that Kubernetes is viable and sensible enough to achieve ubiquity.

What does this year’s report tell us?

Kubernetes has a wide range of applications, as evidenced by data on usage and adoption:

• For production workloads (not just sandboxes or tests), in public cloud spaces (not just private cloud or the laptop-under-the-desk), and by “ordinary” companies (not just Software as a Service vendor), observability is becoming a prerequisite for all of the above. 

However, that is only a high-level read. If you look closely at the report, you’ll notice that a more complex story is beginning to emerge.

Containerization is evolving in the eyes of both developers and companies.
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The emergence of Kubernetes—which has seen a 67 percent increase in developers utilizing K8s and a 49 percent increase in overall container use since last year—is directly linked to the maturation of container adoption. It also signals a shift in how organizations approach development in general. Because more non-SaaS vendors are learning about containers and how to use them, most enterprises finally realize the lousy notion of “lift and shift” was all along. They’ve given up trying to P-to-V (physical-to-virtualize) “MyBigCorporateApp” into a container and then shoving it into the cloud, only to lose their minds the next month when their AWS bill has So. Many. Zeros. Leaders in both the development and operations teams have successfully persuaded the management of the importance of extensively rewriting programs so that they are “container friendly” and take advantage of the new structure and environment.

​​The necessity for consistent and repeatable orchestration, dependable scalability, and pervasive observability throughout the entire stack becomes unavoidable as you better grasp containerization and how to apply it. Of course, this is where Kubernetes begins to shine.

Organizations aren’t interested in developing their Software.
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The report, however, reveals a second, more subtle, significant aspect. Individuals, teams, and businesses are becoming more aware of Kubernetes’ capabilities, but many aren’t interested in building their own.

It is similar to storage management in that no one wants to manage a storage array. (Except Stephen Foskett, a lovable eccentric.) Nonetheless, we like him.

Everyone flocked to storage alternatives that promised, “simply click this button, and we’ll take care of the rest.” Despite the efforts of people like Keith Townsend, Kelsey Hightower, and others to break down the process of rolling your Kubernetes, the overwhelming response was, “Could we just…NOT, instead?”

We’ve observed an increase in providers offering Kubernetes-as-a-Service and a voracious hunger among users of these services. Ninety-two percent of New Relic’s Kubernetes-enabled customer accounts are managed. This research reveals that many firms are turning to managed service providers to manage their core infrastructure and may even prefer it.

But wait, there’s more: our research suggests that this is the state of could lead to people not understanding what they’re doing or how Kubernetes operates behind the scenes!

What does this sound like to you? Electricity. Plumbing. Any service which has been undervalued to the point of being a commodity. Companies used to delegate auto mechanics, copier repair, telecom specialists (mutters under his breath “desktop IT assistance”), and other professions. However, as the service became more generally available, it became obsolete, resulting in more uniform installs, making the service easier to use.

Kubernetes may be heading in a similar direction, with few people needing to understand how it works. While this race to the bottom commoditization would be a death knell in a for-profit context, it’s an incredible triumph when it comes to open-source solutions like these.

Anyone who has worked in IT for more than 15 minutes knows how quickly forecasts can go wrong, but I’m willing to take a chance and say that I believe Kubernetes is ready to shine and reign supreme in its field. The popularity of Kubernetes continues to explode, according to our “O11y Trends Report for 2022”: “…with 88 percent of IT decision-makers exploring Kubernetes, with 25% of respondents conducting research, 25% evaluating, 29 percent in development and 10% in production, the popularity of Kubernetes continues to explode.”

However, I’d be negligent if I didn’t mention the unique obstacles with that type of expansion. It all boils down to the fact that you can’t tell if something is “better” if you don’t know how it used to work or what “normal” looks like. And the only way to do so is to be observable (o11y). This development also introduces obstacles and gaps from the essential cultural shift to technology trends and advancements, according to the O11y Trends report. More visibility into operations and capabilities for self-defense and self-healing against malicious applications will be required as the next wave of microservices, and more stateful applications are deployed on Kubernetes and container-based systems (both intentional and unintentional).

The advent of MSP (managed service provider)-like choices for Kubernetes, according to the CNCF Annual Survey Report, is driving enterprises even farther “up the stack” in terms of development methodologies and procedures. Companies are beginning to act more like cloud-native corporations, even if it isn’t their core business. They’re increasing the number of production updates in a cycle and forsaking traditional monitoring tools and approaches in favor of powerful observability alternatives.

The CNCF Annual Survey Report contains further information. Individuals, teams, and companies are maturing in their usage of containers and state of cloud technologies, which thrills the heart of this grizzled (and occasionally jaded) IT veteran. People are (finally) putting DevOps colleagues’ hard-won lessons into daily practice. These practices ensure that businesses benefit from these habits while also improving the cloud computing ecosystem.

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