Survey Surfaces Cloud-Native Stress Points

A survey from Platform9, a managed Kubernetes service provider, finds that even as organizations embrace cloud-native technologies, concerns over security, management, high availability and observability remain.

The survey, which polled more than 500 IT leaders and practitioners, also finds more than two-thirds of respondents (67%) are deploying cloud-native technologies beyond a single cloud platform.

John Jamie, vice president of marketing for Platform9, says that as IT organizations confront cloud-native challenges the need to rely on a managed service provider becomes more apparent. The top concerns cited by survey respondents are security (24%), management (23%), high availability (22%) and observability (16%).

Nearly 85% of respondents say they are either already using Kubernetes (65%) or have plans to deploy it (20%) in the next six months. Despite relying on Kubernetes, however, 61% of respondents say they still have high or moderate concerns about vendor lock-in, with 71% of advanced users with larger deployments more concerned than early adopters. Efforts to reduce the chances of being locked into a single provider involve everything from contracting with multiple cloud service providers to writing portable applications and making broader use of open source technologies, the survey finds.

Despite those concerns, adoption of Kubernetes is moving ahead. In fact, the survey also finds more than half (53%) of respondents planning to containerize existing legacy applications, with 34% planning on rearchitecting applications while 20% plan to lift and shift virtual machines running applications into a container.

Not surprisingly, the survey also finds DevOps, cloud platform engineering, cloud-native developers and security are all top hiring investments for 2022. The challenge, however, is the difficulty of hiring and retaining IT professionals with those skills, notes Jamie. As such, the fastest path to deploying cloud-native applications is to leverage the expertise of a managed service provider, he adds. After all, the real value is in the application rather than the management of the underlying infrastructure that enables that application to be deployed, says Jamie.

Nevertheless, 34% of respondents say they will increase their efforts to manage cloud-native environments themselves versus 21% that said they will reduce those efforts. Another 26% say they will maintain their current level of effort.

It’s not clear to what degree organizations will ultimately rely more on managed services to address considerably more complex cloud-native computing environments. When it comes to IT management, there has always been tension between internal IT teams and external service providers. Historically, the bulk of IT environments have been managed by internal IT teams. The issue that organizations are confronting now is the advanced skills required to manage cloud-native applications and environments are in short supply.

Regardless of who manages the underlying platforms, however, the number of cloud-native applications being built and deployed is steadily rising. As such, the management challenges associated with deploying cloud-native applications at scale are now coming to a head as organizations wrestle with how much of their resources to devote to building applications versus managing infrastructure.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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