The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has published the results of its annual survey conducted in October 2019. Among the 1337 respondents, 37% were from Europe, 38% from North America and 17% were from Asia. The survey respondents included architects, DevOps managers and backend developers.
Containers
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Here are 15 interesting takeaways from the CNCF annual survey.
1. Kubernetes usage in production is skyrocketing
Compared to last year, Kubernetes usage in production has seen a dramatic rise. 78% of respondents are using Kubernetes in production, an impressive growth compared to 58% last year. Most of those testing Kubernetes last year moved into production resulting in a decrease of 48% in the evaluation.
CNCF Projects
CNCF
2. Customers are running at least 2 to 5 Kubernetes clusters in production
43% of the respondents mentioned that they run anywhere between 2 to 5 Kubernetes clusters in production. This is expected to grow in the coming months.
Kubernetes Clusters
CNCF
3. Public cloud is the most preferred destination while the hybrid cloud is gaining momentum
The majority (62%) of the respondents are running their workloads in the public cloud with remaining running in a hybrid cloud environment. With the push on Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud platforms, we will see an increase in the hybrid cloud adoption next year.
Infrastructure Choice
CNCF
4. Containers are making their way to the production environments
According to CNCF, 84% of respondents are using containers in production, an impressive jump from 73% in 2018, and from 23% in the first survey conducted in 2016. Given the interest in microservices, It’s not surprising to see a massive increase in container usage.
Container Usage
CNCF
5. Amazon EKS is used by most respondents followed by GKE and AKS
AWS continues to be the most preferred cloud to run containers and Kubernetes. 29% of the respondents are using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes (EKS) service. Within the 17% of Kops users, there would be clusters provisioned on Amazon EC2 making AWS the top cloud platform for Kubernetes. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is very close with 28% of respondents using it as the CaaS. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) combined with the legacy ACS Engine got decent traction of about 25% adoption from the respondents.
Container Orchestration
CNCF
6. Developers are facing a cultural challenge in embracing containers and cloud native
Cultural challenges with the development team, security, complexity, readiness and monitoring are the top 5 challenges in adopting cloud native technologies.
Challenges in Using Cloud Native
CNCF
7. Istio is the top service mesh used by early adopters
CNCF introduced a new survey category on service mesh. Only 18% of respondents are using it in production while 47% of respondents are evaluating the use of a service mesh. Istio followed by Consul are the most popular service mesh platforms. Consul’s usage in production is higher because of the varied use cases it supports. Many deployments use Consul as a key/value database instead of service mesh.
Service Mesh
CNCF
8. Block storage services in the public cloud is the de facto storage engine
With stateful workloads becoming mainstream on Kubernetes, storage becomes the key. Given that most of the workloads on running in the public cloud, it’s not surprising to see the cloud-based block storage services are the most preferred backends for stateful workloads running in production.
Storage Choices
CNCF
9. AWS Lambda is the most popular Functions as a Service (FaaS) platform
Though not directly related to Kubernetes, customers are using Functions as a Service (FaaS) along with containers. AWS Lambda took a huge lead with Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions as distant second and third.
Serverless Platforms
CNCF
10. Knative gets the top slot in Kubernetes-based serverless platform
Event-driven, serverless frameworks on Kubernetes are gaining traction among cloud native developers. With 34% of respondents voting for Knative, it is the most popular serverless framework followed by OpenFaaS, Kubeless and Virtual Kubelet.
Serverless on Kubernetes
CNCF
11. Helm is the most preferred tool for packaging Kubernetes applications
Helm is touted as the apt-get install of Kubernetes. It’s not at all surprising to see Helm as the most popular packaging tool for Kubernetes.
Packaging Choices
CNCF
12. Nginx is the leading ingress provider
Nginx and Nginx Plus as ingress are used by most of the Kubernetes users. Envoy as a standalone ingress is also growing fast.
Ingress Usage
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13. Minikube is the most favorite Kubernetes environment
Minikube is the reason why Kubernetes has become accessible to developers. Though Docker Desktop has Kubernetes embedded in it, many developers still prefer Minikube.
Kubernetes Dev Environment
CNCF
14. Prometheus and CoreDNS are the fastest-growing CNCF projects
Within the graduated projects of CNCF, Prometheus and CoreDNS are fastest growing after Kubernetes. Prometheus is becoming the de facto for collecting and aggregating the metrics while CoreDNS provides naming services for the cluster.
CNCF Projects
CNCF
15. The etcd database is the most widely used CNCF incubating projet
Kubernetes clusters rely on an in-memory, distributed database for maintaining the state. The etcd project, which is currently in the incubation stage, is found in almost in every Kubernetes deployment. Many projects and applications rely on etcd due to its smaller footprint and simplified management.
CNCF Incubation Projects
