Mesosphere Survey Sees More Kubernetes on DC/OS

There’s often a fair amount of contention between proponents of Kubernetes and the DC/OS platform based on Mesos. Many supporters of Kubernetes are convinced that the platform eventually will acquire all the attributes of Mesos and DC/OS. Backers of DC/OS note many enterprise IT organizations simply can’t wait for Kubernetes to be able to scale in a way that matches what Mesosphere provides today.

A new survey of 744 IT leaders conducted by Mesosphere finds that Kubernetes is now the most widely deployed and fastest growing class of workloads on DC/OS.

The survey finds the top reasons organizations are looking to deploy Kubernetes on DC/OS include simplifying deployment (97 percent); followed by ease of upgrade and administration (88 percent). A need to support various big data services on Kubernetes (68 percent) and the need to support multiple Kubernetes clusters (56 percent) also were listed as top reasons.

Ed Hsu, vice president of product for Mesosphere, says his company is betting that as Kubernetes cluster sprawl becomes a bigger issue in enterprise IT environments, the value of the DC/OS platform will become more apparent. Standing up and maintaining a single Kubernetes cluster is often challenging for the average IT organization, he notes.

In general, the Mesosphere survey finds on average organizations are supporting three or more services on the platform. As IT infrastructure platforms continue to advance, the level of density of the average server is only going to increase as more workloads are deployed per physical machine, says Hsu. By providing a means to deploy those workloads in addition to automating the underlying infrastructure, Hsu says Mesosphere provides a consistent approach to automating the management of a wide variety of different types of clusters.

In addition, the survey finds most respondents still run clusters of fewer than 100 nodes; however, there was a 50 percent increase in users who are moving to large-scale production environments of more than 1,000 nodes. It’s unlikely those organizations are hiring a commensurate number of IT administrators to manage all those nodes. Instead, IT organizations increasingly are relying on frameworks such as DC/OS to automate the management of IT at scale, Hsu says.

The Mesosphere survey also finds there been a significant surge in usage of DC/OS in hybrid cloud computing environments. Almost one-third (32 percent) of respondents are employing DC/OS in a hybrid cloud, compared to 30 percent using DC/OS in a cloud-only mode and 38 percent using it only in a on-premises IT environment. The survey also finds that usage of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has increased considerably. Almost one-quarter (24 percent) are now using Microsoft Azure, while 14 percent are using GCP. Amazon Web Services (AWS) usage is at 77 percent. A total of 24 percent report they are employing multiple cloud providers.

The one thing the survey does make clear is that enterprise IT organizations are starting to aggressively embrace Kubernetes. The next big issue will be learning to live with it.

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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