Survey Shows Significant Spike in Kubernetes Use

A survey of 500 full-time IT department employees finds more than three-quarters of respondents (79%) work for organizations that have increased their use of Kubernetes clusters over the last two years, with 87% expecting Kubernetes to play an even larger role over the next two years.

The survey polled IT workers in companies with at least 500 employees and was conducted by Portworx by Pure Storage.

The primary reasons for increased Kubernetes use are the need to increase levels of automation (56%), followed by reduced IT costs (53%), the need to deploy applications faster (49%) and digital transformation initiatives spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic (48%). Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) say they believe that the pandemic accelerated the overall adoption of Kubernetes.

The survey also identifies Azure Kubernetes Service or Azure Arc for Kubernetes as the top cloud platform for deploying Kubernetes (31%), followed by Google Kubernetes Engine or Google Anthos (27%) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or EKS Anywhere (24%).

In addition, the survey finds the number of stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters also has dramatically increased. Organizations are running an average of 45% of their databases and data services on Kubernetes, the survey finds.

Overall, the survey identifies the top challenges when running Kubernetes to be security (51%), data management (43%), reliability (34%), networking (33%), scalability (33%) and multi-cloud computing (32%).

The survey also finds that cybercriminals are now targeting workloads running on K8s clusters, with 56% of respondents noting that more than 60% of their new applications running in containers have been hit by a ransomware attack. A full 86% say they were able to recover from those attacks in a few hours.

Nevertheless, more than half (53%) of respondents indicate that data protection is a top challenge associated with running databases on Kubernetes, while a third (33%) cite disaster recovery as an issue. A full 87% of respondents say their organization experienced at least one outage in the last 12 months, with 83% reporting those outages were Kubernetes-related.

Among survey respondents reporting outages, 25% had one outage that was Kubernetes-related while 41% had two to five. A total of 17% had six or more. Only 12% of our survey respondents indicated their organization hadn’t experienced an outage in the past 12 months. However, nearly two-thirds of the respondents (63%) said those outages lasted less than one hour. Only 10% experienced outages that lasted for one day or longer.

Venkat Ramakrishnan, vice president of products and engineering for Portworx by Pure Storage, says there is no such thing as a stateless mission-critical application. As adoption of Kubernetes clusters continues to increase, the need to protect data on those platforms is becoming more apparent. The challenge is IT teams will need an application-aware approach to data protection as IT environments become more complex in the cloud-native era, he added.

More challenging still, many of those stateful applications will be running on highly distributed edge computing platforms where applications will be processing, analyzing and storing data locally, Ramakrishnan noted.

Survey respondents identified some specific areas where Kubernetes needs to be improved, including storage and data management (75%), application development frameworks (64%), monitoring and observability (61%) and networking (57%). Essentially, despite current levels of increased adoption, it’s clear Kubernetes remains a work in progress.

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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