Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.
Kubernetes and the ecosystem of cloud native technologies unlock innovation for organizations and provide a means to achieve the goals of elasticity, agility, optimized resource utilization, reduced service costs and workload portability. Security and optimized resource utilization are high priorities for practitioners, reminding us that the cloud native space is maturing, and focus is moving from Day Zero to Day Two operations, according to the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations survey report from Canonical.
Hybrid vs Multi-Cloud: What is the Reality Behind the Adoption?
More than 83% of respondents said they are using either hybrid or multi-cloud. Compared to the 2021 survey, the percentage of respondents who did not use hybrid or multi-cloud dropped from 22.4% to 16.4%.
When analyzing the reality behind this adoption and the increasing growth of hybrid cloud in the enterprise, the key question organization's need to be asking is: at will, can you run workloads where they are most useful, advantageous, and/or cost efficient?
Based on the findings, the pattern we’re seeing is that medium and large institutions are moving towards a model with a fully automated private cloud and relationships with two or more public cloud providers. We’re seeing both workload and data repatriation to the private cloud and expansion into multi-cloud use cases.
Thoughts on Kubernetes on Bare Metal?
The decision of where to run applications can be a complex one. 14% of survey respondents said they run everything on Kubernetes, with over 20% saying on bare metal and VMs, and over 29% said a combination of bare metal, VMs, and Kubernetes. This distribution is a proof point for the resiliency of so-called "legacy" applications, but also to the desire for resource optimization.
Bare metal is often touted as a better choice for compute and resource-heavy use cases, such as interactive machine learning jobs. As Kubernetes becomes more accessible, there is speculation that organizations will further adopt Kubernetes on bare metal, if the option is known and understood.
No Surprise: Security is Still Everyone's Concern
38% of respondents suggest that security is the most important consideration when operating Kubernetes, building container images, or defining an edge strategy. While keeping clusters up to date is a definitive best practice to solve security issues, it is seemingly not as embedded within the strategic-thinking IT infrastructure group as one could expect.
Moreover, only 13.5% of people reported that they’ve "mastered" security in the cloud native space. It is clear that organizations have some room to grow when it comes to properly adopting and managing Kubernetes in production.
Consider an App Store for Operators?
Finally, when asked if they would trust an operator built by an expert, more than 50% of respondents said yes. This is a proof point that the skills gap is still a major issue for organizations. However, the provenance and accessibility of operators need to be addressed to mitigate the main concerns of organizations adopting new technologies, and in particular open-source solutions.
As the need for automation of operations continues to grow, finding a safe place to get the necessary tools is becoming more and more important. The idea of an "App Store" where people can publish and consume operators has been put forward by experts responding to this year and last year’s survey.
Looking into the future, despite obstacles, Kubernetes adoption is consistently growing. Understanding the experience, in addition to the top level concerns of developers and users, needs to stay at the top of organizational minds in the years to come.
Furthermore, as the AI, machine learning, and data platforms space continues to evolve, and platforms adapt to support these more diverse toolsets, the goals of its users will transform with it.
Industry News
Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.
Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.
Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.
DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.
Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.
Buildkite announced the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Packagecloud, a cloud-based software package management platform, in an all stock deal.
CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire Bionic, a provider of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).
Perforce Software announces BlazeMeter's Test Data Pro, the latest addition to its continuous testing platform.
CloudBees announced a new cloud native DevSecOps platform that places platform engineers and developer experience front and center.
Akuity announced a new open source tool, Kargo, to implement change promotions across many application life cycle stages using GitOps principles.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced that it has been recognized on Newsweek’s inaugural list of the World’s Most Trustworthy Companies 2023.
CloudBees announced significant performance and scalability breakthroughs for Jenkins® with new updates to its CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) software.