Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.18, the latest version of the hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.
In 2021, IT spending has continued to increase around the world as businesses remain working remotely, and hybrid office spaces become the new normal. By year end, Gartner forecasts that IT spending will hit $4.1 trillion(link is external) — an increase of 8.4% from 2020.
As businesses look to digitally transform and innovate, emerging technologies such as Kubernetes and microservices are helping drive this spend upward, but with increased adoption comes increased operational challenges and growing pains.
Without sufficient tools, development teams employing Kubernetes spend a significant amount of time locating and fixing bugs, and often have to log directly into clusters to gain insight into the applications contained within them. Even when organizations have tools designed to alleviate these challenges, the setup, configuration, and scaling of Kubernetes clusters presents new issues.
To gain more insight into the challenges organizations face while using Kubernetes,Traefik Labs conducted a survey of over 1000 software engineers, DevOps practitioners, SREs and more. The results of this survey identified several issues IT teams face with Kubernetes, and help explain what's hindering the emerging technology's implementation.
Early Adopters Surge Ahead
While more than two thirds of the survey respondents reported using Kubernetes-based container orchestrators, 58% of these users are still running less than half of their business critical applications through the platform.
This could suggest that the majority of Kubernetes users are still early in their adoption of the technology. Comparatively, those familiar with the technology, roughly a quarter of the survey respondents, stated they run more than 75% of their business-critical applications on Kubernetes.
Lack of Observability and Insight
To make matters complicated, 60% of Kubernetes users responded to say they use multiple ingress technologies, and 61% reported the use of more than one or more public cloud providers. For software engineers operating in environments like these observability becomes a large challenge as it's difficult to obtain a clear view of everything deployed within clusters.
While some organizations leverage observability platforms to help address these issues, 48% of survey respondents reported they still have trouble setting up and configuring their clusters, and 28% find that maintenance of the orchestration platform is too challenging. In addition, respondents indicated the information received from these platforms is too generic and not actionable enough to accurately monitor and troubleshoot clusters.
The main issue survey respondents identified with troubleshooting was knowing which tool to use. Having too many available solutions and no clear way of observing clusters can overwhelm engineers, and is leading 50% of Kubernetes users to log directly into the clusters themselves to identify issues. As a result, 55% of Kubernetes users are having to spend hours fixing issues rather than minutes.
Scaling Pains
Although many organizations leverage Kubernetes in one way or another, due to the challenges identified above, scaling these implementations is a lingering challenge. When survey respondents were asked what the reasons were behind not scaling up, or increasing Kubernetes usage, the top response was cost management (44%). Knowing there's a plethora of solutions being used by teams leveraging Kubernetes, it's not surprising that costs are running high — especially seeing as issues that arise with the platform can require hours to fix.
These challenges exacerbate an environment that's already complex and widely distributed with multiple cloud environments, networking ingresses, hosting providers, and dozens of other tools. Those organizations looking to adopt Kubernetes or expand their usage of it are in dire need of solutions to help with configuration, scalability and maintenance of clusters. But, instead of just adding another tool to their toolbox, a better solution would be domain-agnostic tools that work out of the box and provide a holistic approach to managing dispersed environments.
Industry News
Akamai Technologies announced a Managed Container Service designed for companies that want to deliver better experiences by running workloads closer to users, devices, and sources of data.
Couchbase announced that its Capella AI Model Services have integrated NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, to streamline deployment of AI-powered applications, providing enterprises a powerful solution for privately running generative (GenAI) models.
GitLab announced the general availability of GitLab Duo Self-Hosted.
Tigera announced the introduction of several new innovations to Calico, including a new Ingress Gateway capability for Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise, and the launch of Calico Dashboards.
Copado introduced three AI-powered DevOps apps for Slack.
Gearset announced that it now supports Salesforce's Agentforce.
Sonar announced the acquisition of AutoCodeRover, an autonomous AI agent platform for software development.
Faros AI announced a collaboration with Microsoft to deliver its AI-powered platform for optimizing engineering workflows on Azure.
Apollo GraphQL announced the general availability of Apollo Connectors for REST APIs and new GraphOS platform enhancements — giving enterprises a faster, more efficient way to execute their API strategies.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Check Point CloudGuard solution has been recognized as a Leader across three key GigaOm Radar reports: Application & API Security, Cloud Network Security, and Cloud Workload Security.
LaunchDarkly announced the private preview of Warehouse Native Experimentation, its Snowflake Native App, to offer Data Warehouse Native Experimentation.
SingleStore announced the launch of SingleStore Flow, a no-code solution designed to greatly simplify data migration and Change Data Capture (CDC).
ActiveState launched its Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaas) offering to help organizations manage open source and accelerate secure software delivery.
Genkit for Node.js is now at version 1.0 and ready for production use.