How Kubernetes Won the Container War

Earlier this month, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) released the results of its CNCF Survey for 2019. Some of those results included:

• Containers dominate development, hitting 84% usage in production.
• 18% of respondents are currently using service mesh in production, and an additional 47% are looking into it.
• The maturity of CI/CD tools has increased daily release cycles 12% and weekly cycles by 8% over the year prior.

The CNCF Survey also confirms what we’ve known for some time, which is that Kubernetes has won the container war. In fact, most companies that have been on the adoption journey for a while are now in production and continue to expand, as shown by the number of machines, clusters, and containers in usage.

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On the platform front, 38% of respondents to the survey have a hybrid deployment model spanning providers to increase availability and reduce vendor lock-in—an agnostic approach that is increasingly enticing for enterprises.

Digging deeper

Extrapolating from the trends in the CNCF Survey, here are seven things we believe will be coming next:

1. Advanced workloads

Many companies will move beyond the basics of how to install and run Kubernetes into more advanced workloads.

2. Continued adoption

Adoption of DevOps and SRE tools and processes will only continue to grow, as will the benefits of increased development velocity.

3. New types of apps

While the majority of apps running in Kubernetes today are web and service architectures, we expect to see a focus on new types of apps in the next wave of workloads, such as:

• Microservices supported by a service mesh
• Batch processing
• Machine learning at scale
• IoT stream processing

4. Focus on observability

Observability will be an important focus going forward as enterprises look to better understand and troubleshoot workloads, as well as tie metrics back to business drivers.

5. More movement to Kubernetes

As storage options mature and expand, more stateful applications will move to Kubernetes.

6. Easier deployment

New tools and architecture will make it much easier to deploy apps across multiple, independent clusters.

7. Increased hybrid usage

Using a combination of cloud and private datacenter providers—also known as hybrid—will become the standard, especially with large enterprises that want to maintain control and minimize vendor lock-in.

These are just some of the trends we see in the coming year. Check back in with CNCF for their 2020 results to see how well we did with our predictions.

To learn more about Kubernetes, containers, and any other enterprise technology questions you may have, contact one of our experts. You can also read our free guide to developing cloud-native applications here.