Portworx’s new report celebrates 10 years of Kubernetes and explores how organizations are leveraging Kubernetes for data management, the rise of platform engineering, and the future of cloud-native platforms.
Today, June 6, marks the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes. Kubernetes began as a Google project and was released as open source in June 2014. Over the past ten years, it has emerged as the de-facto standard for container orchestration, used by developers and organizations worldwide 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 with 500 employees or more. Survey participants were spread out across job functions, from platform engineers to senior executives at the VP or C-Suite level. 56% of respondents can be classified as experts with four 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 and 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.
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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 adopted Kubernetes, 41% are already building most of their new applications on cloud-native platforms. That number will double in the next five years, with 80% planning to build most of their new applications on cloud-native platforms.
What’s become clear is that Kubernetes is no longer merely an emerging technology. Those who run data on Kubernetes trust 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 must provide enterprise-grade capabilities for these applications to run efficiently and securely.
The rising importance of platform engineering
Platform engineering teams are driving 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 critical to driving cloud native success, and executives are no strangers 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.
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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 VMs to Kubernetes management 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.
To download the full report, click here.
