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The KubeCon and CloudNativeCon events have just ended in Europe, and one thing has become clear: the opportunities are far outweighing the ability of organizations to take advantage of its potential. Keith Townsend, who attended the conference, observed tweet that “talent and education are the number one challenge. I don’t currently see a viable way to migrate thousands of apps without too many resources. There’s more to it than people and money.”
Photo: Joe McKendrick
Real. Information technology becomes more complex every day, and there is no shortage of need for monitoring capabilities and automation in the construction and management of systems. Cloud-native platforms are seen as a remedy not only to improve maintenance, monitoring, and automation, but also to modernize infrastructure and achieve faster time to market. At the same time, the skill and security of cloud-native systems remains a major concern.
These points were confirmed in a survey out of more than 1,300 global respondents from Canonicalpublisher of Ubuntu. The survey found that 83% are using hybrid or multi-cloud, but nearly 50% say that lack of in-house skills and limited talent could hinder migration to or use of Kubernetes and containers.
The benefits of cloud-native technology mentioned include elasticity and agility, resource optimization, and reduced service costs.
Why use Cloud Native?
- Improved maintenance, monitoring and automation (64%)
- Infrastructure modernization (44%)
- Faster time to market (26%)
- Lower infrastructure TCO (18%)
Top benefits of Cloud-Native technology for business
- Elasticity and agility (50%)
- Resource optimization (27%)
- Reduced service costs (21%)
- Faster time to market (21%)
- Cloud mobility (19%)
- Developer productivity (19%)
The survey explored exactly where the applications were run. At least 14% of respondents say they run everything on Kubernetes, more than 20% say on bare metal and virtual machines, and over 29% say a mix of bare metal, virtual machines, and Kubernetes. “This allocation demonstrates the flexibility of Kubernetes allowing organizations to run the same type of workloads anywhere,” the report’s authors stated.
Security continues to be an issue for cloud and Kubernetes users, with 38% of respondents stating that security is the most important factor considered when operating Kubernetes, building container images, or defining edge strategy. Notably, only 14% reported that they had “mastered” security in the cloud-native space.
Biggest Challenges for Kubernetes and Container Deployment
- Lack of internal skills / limited manpower (48%)
- IT company structure (38%)
- Incompatible with older systems (32%)
- Difficult to train users (29%)
- Security and compliance concerns have not been adequately addressed (25%)
- Integrating cloud-native apps together (22%)
- Poor or limited support from platform vendors or partners (17%)
- Network requests are not fully resolved (\17%)
- Excess cost (16%)
- Storage/data requirements not fully addressed (16%)
- Observability/supervisibility requirements not addressed (15%)
Among the cited use cases for cloud-native environments, refactoring proprietary solutions into microservices ranked as the top performer. However, one of the contributors to the report voiced a warning about the use of microservices. “If you treat microservices as a panacea, you will be disappointed” Tim Hockin, Google Cloud Platform lead software engineer and report contributor. “It’s a way of organizing teams. Microservices provide a good way to do that. But if you think it’s going to take a bad app and make it good, you’ll be disappointed. Or if your app is bad, you’ll be disappointed. you’re unreliable, or it follows the big ball of mud architecture, then you’ll have a hard time too.”
Top Cloud-Native Use Cases
- Refactoring proprietary solutions into microservices (19%)
- Deploy and test applications in the CI/CD channel (15%)
- Switch to an open source solution (13%)
- Manage or enable a hybrid cloud setup (11%)
- Deploy or manage Kubernetes-as-a-Service (10%)
- Organize workloads on a multi-cloud installation (10%)
Even with the continued growth of cloud computing, there is a push and pull between on-premises and off-premises approaches. “When people refer to a lack of skill as a bottleneck, the truth is they’re often already in an environment where they’re ready to do the next thing but don’t have the infrastructure or organizational support to do it. that,” Ken Sipe, a senior enterprise architect affiliated with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Edward Jones. “Buy versus build is also an issue: when purchasing a solution and accompanying services, an organization benefits from leveraging external resources and skill sets without the need to build capacity.” When building it in-house, the organization can benefit from exercising its engineering discipline, which can be a useful differentiator.”
