Guest post by Rajiv Thakkar, Director of Product Marketing, Portworx, Pure Storage (LinkedIn)
Today, June 6, marks the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes. Kubernetes originally began as a project in Google and was released as open source in June 2014. Over the past 10 years, it has emerged as the de-facto standard for container orchestration, used by developers and organizations around the world for modern application development.
Portworx by Pure Storage partnered with Dimensional Research, a third party research company, to survey over 500 participants who run data on Kubernetes at companies of 500 employees or more. Survey participants were spread out across job functions, from platform engineers to senior executives at VP or C-Suite level. 56% of respondents can be classified as experts with 4 or more years of Kubernetes experience, while a vast majority (91%) had at least two years.
The report will uncover some of the top priorities experts have across virtualization and persistent storage, as well as the data management challenges platform engineers face when managing complex Kubernetes environments that often span hybrid and multi-cloud environments as well as VM and container environments.
Cloud Native Platforms are the Platforms of the Future
The experts have spoken: Cloud native platforms will dominate the future. Of the organizations that have already adopted Kubernetes, 41% are already building most of their new applications on cloud native platforms. In the next five years, that number will double, with 80% planning to build most of their new applications on cloud native.
What’s become clear is that Kubernetes is no longer merely an emerging technology. Those who run data on Kubernetes are trusting it more than ever to host mission critical applications, like databases, real-time analytics, and AI/ML workloads. The growing emergence of these critical workloads means that their cloud native data platforms need to be able to provide enterprise-grade capabilities for these applications to run efficiently and securely.
The Rising Importance of Platform Engineering
Platform engineering teams are in the driver’s seat when it comes to the growth of these cloud native platforms. Of the 527 participants surveyed, 96% reported having a platform engineering function at their organization.
These teams are a critical piece of driving cloud native success, and executives are no stranger to their value. Executives were 1.8x more likely than other functions to view the move to platform engineering as a promotion, and they’re willing to invest time and resources into upskilling existing staff (63%), engaging with consultants (59%), and hiring skilled engineers (52%) to support this increasingly important function.
Report Takeaways
These are only a few of the top highlights from the report. A few more top takeaways from Kubernetes experts on data trends in the enterprise are:
- Traditional VM infrastructure is at an inflection point: 58% will migrate some of their VMs to Kubernetes management by using technologies such as KubeVirt. Of these organizations, 65% plan to migrate their VMs within the next two years, indicating urgency.
- Data on Kubernetes accelerates application delivery: Nearly all (98%) of respondents run data-intensive workloads on cloud-native platforms, with critical apps like databases (72%), analytics (67%), and AI/ML workloads (54%) being built on Kubernetes.
Read the report in full here: The Voice of Kubernetes Experts 2024: The Top Data Trends Driving the Future of the Enterprise, and see how trend-setting organizations that are further along in their Kubernetes journey are planning for a cloud native future.