Survey Sees Steady Pace of Enterprise Transition to Kubernetes
Volterra, a provider of a hybrid cloud computing platform based on Kubernetes, today published the results of a survey of 300 IT decision-makers in the U.S. that finds more than half of respondents are employing Kubernetes today, yet only 10% are running more than half their business applications on Kubernetes.
Mark Weiner, chief marketing officer for Volterra, says the survey, which was conducted by the market research firm Propeller Insights, makes it clear that the transition to cloud-native applications in the enterprise will take a fair amount of time, like most previous transitions to a new platform.
According to the survey results, 86% of respondents are running some type of cloud-native application, with 81% reporting they also employ multiple clouds. However, 57% of respondents note less than 10% of all their business apps are based on microservices architecture, while 88% say that less than 25% of business apps are based on them.
More than half of respondents (58%) also report that the growing number of application programming interfaces (APIs) being generated by microservices is causing issues, with security (77%) emerging as the top challenge currently faced. The survey also notes 44% of respondents are experiencing issues with deploying applications across multiple platforms.
The survey notes that most commonly DevOps teams are managing Kubernetes environments (63%), with 67% of respondents reporting DevOps teams are now responsible for choosing networking and security solutions for their Kubernetes environments. The most widely employed container orchestration platform is Kubernetes (57%), followed by Docker Swarm (54%).
Weiner says it’s now only a matter of time before IT team re-evaluate the platforms they are deploying microservices-based applications on. Legacy platforms simply don’t provide the level of built-in automation required needed to manage modern applications as scale, notes Weiner. Close to half of respondents (47%) noted 10% to 25% of the time delivering a new service in a Kubernetes environment is spent on operational complexities. Most IT teams (70%) require two to three months to deliver a new service, the survey finds.
To achieve that goal Volterra created VoltMesh, an instance of a service mesh the company built on top of open source Tungsten Fabric, previously known as Contrail software-defined networking (SDN) software. Volterra, as a result, is able to connect highly distributed instances of Kubernetes from Layers 4 through 7 of the networking stack to, for example, enable IT teams to encrypt API routing between Kubernetes clusters. Volterra also makes available a Volterra Console to manage and observe applications distributed across its platform.
It’s not clear to what degree IT teams are gearing up to consolidate the management of multiple clouds as they deploy Kubernetes more widely. There’s clearly an opportunity to centralize the management of multiple clouds by employ the APIs that Kubernetes exposes to reduce the total cost of IT. Legacy applications are, of course, not going away anytime soon. However, the days when IT teams need to switch consoles to manage multiple cloud computing environments may one day soon come to an end.
