Kubernetes a Top Priority for ITOps and DevOps in 2023, Study Finds 

A recent study has revealed that Kubernetes has become a top-priority organisation wishing to remain agile and deploy services rapidly in today’s market. 

The study, entitled State of Kubernetes 2023, surveyed 800 C-level execs and senior ITOps and DevOps professionals from various sectors to gain insights into the types and sizes of containerised applications and other workloads. 

Researchers from Pepperdata found that the Kubernetes market is maturing, with the average number of clusters deployed growing from six to ten clusters per organisation. 

Just under a third of respondents reported having three to five deployments, while 38 per cent reported six to ten clusters. Almost 15 per cent said they had 11 and 25 clusters, and four per cent reported more than 25. 

“The survey confirms that Kubernetes has become the preferred choice for deploying workloads among agile enterprises, Ash Munshi, CEO of Pepperdata said in response to the findings. 

Researchers found that the variety and types of workloads being launched by the container-orchestration tool have also increased. 

The majority of respondents said that their workloads extended beyond microservices to data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics, as well as AI and machine learning. 

When asked about the types of applications being deployed, respondents named data ingestion, cleansing and analytics, with just over 61 per cent naming Apache Spark as the top choice for their organisation. 

Other popular deployments included databases or NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis, as well as web servers like NGINX. 

Kubernetes challenges remain

The findings echo similar studies on Kubernetes showing its popularity within the enterprise. Another study last year found that 96 per cent of organisations were using or evaluating the technology, a record number. 

But while respondents named a multitude of different benefits of employing Kubernetes in their organisations, many also mentioned the challenges it can incur. 

These challenges include significant or unexpected spending of compute, storage, networking infrastructure, and cloud-based IaaS; a steep learning curve; and a lack of visibility into Kubernetes spend, leading to cost overruns. 

Over half cited the “significant or unexpected spend on compute, storage networking infrastructure and/or cloud-based IaaS” as their biggest challenge.”

Read our list for the Top 10 Managed Kubernetes Providers in 2023

“The speed and ease of deployment can result in unexpected infrastructure cost overruns,” Mr Munshi explained. 

“Respondents are increasingly turning to FinOps and cloud cost optimisation tools to help them remediate the cost of operating in the cloud and optimise their Kubernetes clusters.”

If businesses have started their Kubernetes journey, they have already created an environment and apps are likely already being rearchitected for microservices. 

But as the number of applications in production increases, so do demands, leading to complexity due to increased traffic and new levels of functionality required. 

And this does not include the problem of security. Developers need to be able to appropriately manage the authentication and authorisation of all of their users, requiring more of their time. 

Remediating the risks

Despite the multiple challenges of using containers on the production line, many organisations surveyed said they were already turning to wide a variety of approaches to cut downtimes and cost overruns.

44 per cent of respondents said they had already introduced cost reduction and FinOps initiatives to reduce spending overruns by managing and optimising cloud spending across different teams within their organisation. 

Another approach is introducing a high-quality ingress controller and a web application firewall (WAF). An Ingress controller acts as a load balancer for Kubernetes environments because it safely controls how external users can access services within a Kubernetes cluster.

You can run databases on Kubernetes because it's fundamentally the same as running a database on a VM. The biggest challenge is understanding that rubbing Kubernetes on Postgres won't turn it into Cloud SQL. 🧵 https://t.co/zdFobm4ijy

— Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) February 10, 2023

It can help IT and DevOps teams have better visibility and control over Kubernetes traffic, improving its resilience and defence against threat actors. 

To further remediate the risks, Kubernetes need end-to-end security. This could include introducing a service mesh, which helps allow organisations to better control their Kubernetes environment, leading to smoother functionality and better administration policies.

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