Survey Suggests Devs not Completely Sold on Kubernetes
A survey of 1,000 developers finds half are using containers, with nearly three-quarters (73%) of those developers employing Kubernetes in a production environment. However, about half the respondents (47%) also noted the complexity of the platform is hindering further adoption. An equal number of developers working with containers today are not employing Kubernetes at all.
The survey, conducted by Civo, a provider of cloud services, also finds 80% of developers using Kubernetes are familiar with the lightweight K3s distribution of Kubernetes, and more than half (51%) say they would consider running it in production workloads.
The top challenge cited by survey respondents is the steep Kubernetes learning curve (57%). The top two most-cited sources of Kubernetes frustration are the new terms, concepts and commands that developers need to understand and the amount of time it takes to spin up a working Kubernetes cluster.
The top benefits respondents cite are ease of scaling (41%) followed by ease of container management (35%) and optimization of resources (13%).
Civo CEO Mark Boost says as more developers become exposed to Kubernetes, the more they are starting to appreciate the fact they don’t need to deploy the entire container orchestration platform to run their applications. Much of the code in the larger version of Kubernetes is only applicable for cloud service providers running applications at web scale, notes Boost.
K3s is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution that runs as a single binary consuming less than 40MB. That makes it possible to run clusters using servers with just 512MB of RAM. The size of those clusters makes it possible to spin them up in a fraction of the time it takes to launch a larger Kubernetes cluster.
Originally designed to provide developers with a lightweight instance of Kubernetes, cloud service providers such as Civo have started offering cloud services based on the K3s distribution of Kubernetes at a much lower cost because less IT infrastructure is consumed when running it.
It’s not clear whether organizations may ultimately prefer K3s, which, like other distributions of Kubernetes, is being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) after Rancher Labs donated the core project. Rancher Labs was subsequently acquired by SUSE.
Of course, there are plenty of cloud service providers that would prefer developers consume larger distributions of Kubernetes that require more infrastructure. However, there’s increased pressure to reduce cloud costs after the massive spending spree that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the economy recovers, more organizations are starting to reevaluate what classes of workloads are running on various cloud computing services. In many cases, cloud services were provisioned by developers with little regard given to cost at the time.
One way or another the number of lighter-weight instances of Kubernetes running in the cloud should steadily increase in the months and years ahead. Developers are discovering the comparative simplicity of a Kubernetes alternative that, in many cases, offers the added benefit of being much less costly to employ.
