15 Most Interesting Cloud Native Trends From The CNCF Survey – Forbes

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

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

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

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

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, Its not surprising to see a massive increase in container usage.

Container Usage

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

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

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.Consuls 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

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, its not surprising to see the cloud-based block storage services are the most preferred backends for stateful workloads running in production.

Storage Choices

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

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

11. Helm is the most preferred tool for packaging Kubernetes applications

Helm is touted as the apt-get install of Kubernetes. Its not at all surprising to see Helm as the most popular packaging tool for Kubernetes.

Packaging Choices

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

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

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

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

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15 Most Interesting Cloud Native Trends From The CNCF Survey - Forbes