DEVOPSdigest

Most (94%) organizations surveyed deploy services and applications on Kubernetes — but how they deploy varies widely, according to new market research commissioned by Cockroach Labs and Red Hat.

The number one challenge around running Kubernetes in production, as named by survey participants? Deployment of data-intensive transactional workloads.

Organizations are modernizing their infrastructure to take advantage of the cloud, multi-cloud and serverless environments — and those decisions are rooted in the adoption of Kubernetes.

The report reveals:

1. Many organizations use Kubernetes

Many organizations use Kubernetes now, but how they use it diverges sharply. Nearly all organizations surveyed (94%) are using Kubernetes in production. Their approach, however, is almost binary: companies either run 5 or fewer deployment workloads on Kubernetes — or at least triple that load, running 15 or more.

2. Kubernetes priority: Deployment of data-intensive transactional workloads

The number one priority around architecting and running Kubernetes: Deployment of data-intensive transactional workloads. Nearly half (46%) of overall responses chose transactional workloads as their primary concern around effectively architecting for and deploying with Kubernetes. (In fact, 10% of all respondents named this as their only challenge).

3. Companies managing their cloud infrastructure in-house

Companies are almost universally managing their cloud infrastructure with their own in-house DevOps/SRE teams. Only 5% of orgs surveyed use external or fully managed cloud services. This data shows the strong trend here is infrastructure still managed with in-house DevOps/SRE, whether that responsibility is shared across teams, (41%) or trusted to a single dedicated team (54%). Or, in six cases, a single dedicated person.

4. The future is serverless

The future is serverless, and that future is now. A large majority of organizations surveyed (88%) plan to adopt serverless computing — or are already there. This signals a strong shift in data management and application development.

Methodology: The inaugural Kubernetes Adoption Trendsreport is based on survey responses from more than 200 senior decision makers and technologists across Fortune 500 companies and small startups.