In the 2021 CNCF Annual Survey, we stated that Kubernetes had crossed the adoption chasm to become a mainstream global technology. Today, the laggards are finally catching up.

This year’s analysis of cloud adoption, containers, and Kubernetes did not include organizations whose primary revenue stream was derived from offering cloud native products and services – mostly vendors. By focusing our research on organizations that are not in the cloud business, but had a potential or actual reason to consume cloud services, we sought to get a more accurate view into the adoption, benefits, and challenges of consuming cloud products and services. We expected that adoption rates would be less than the 2022 metrics because they included both consumers and providers of cloud services – so we did not do any direct comparisons between 2023 and prior years. However, in 2022, 58% percent of providers and consumers (the entire sample) were using Kubernetes in production and 23% (81% total) were actively evaluating it. In 2023, 66% of potential/actual consumers were using Kubernetes in production and 18% were evaluating it (84% total).

Compounding our findings, respondents reported that just 15% of organizations that consume cloud computing services have no plans to use Kubernetes. There is likely to be erosion to this number as the economics of cloud continues to improve and Kubernetes’ foundational role in the burgeoning AI movement solidifies the project’s status as a core technology, as intrinsic to the global technology ecosystem as the Linux Kernel.

USING OR
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KUBERNETES

Public cloud use is the preferred path for organizations, thanks to its ease of adoption, robust security, and minimal vendor lock-in. In fact, regardless of how we segment the data, public cloud use comes out on top.

Organizations who are just beginning their cloud journey favor public clouds (58%) but steer away from hybrid clouds (29%). This is likely because public clouds have a lower barrier to entry and can remain a key component of a cloud strategy once implemented.

Large organizations are drawn to all cloud types (public, private, and hybrid) but are the primary consumers of hybrid clouds (56%) compared to medium (44%) and small (27%) organizations.

Multi Cloud solutions are now the norm. The use of only public clouds is a strategy used by 28% of organizations and the average number of unique public cloud service providers in use for an organization is 2.3. Multi Cloud solutions (hybrid and other cloud combinations) are used by 56% of organizations. Multi cloud solutions increase the average number of unique cloud services providers by one, and, occasionally, by two.

Asia-Pacific (APAC) lags significantly behind North America and Europe in the adoption of cloud native technologies across end user organizations (those whose primary revenue is not derived from selling cloud native products and services). When we filter the data to remove vendors and focus on end user organizations, 26% in Asia-Pacific either have not started or are just beginning to use cloud native techniques compared to 9% for the Americas and 6% for Europe. Similarly, only 9% of end user organizations in Asia-Pacific do nearly all of their development and 21% do much of their development using cloud native techniques – for a total of 30%. In the Americas, this total (nearly all or much development and deployment use cloud native techniques) is 64% and in Europe, 61%.

A segmentation at the country level for Asia-Pacific shows that the share of organizations who have not started, or are just beginning, to use cloud native techniques is a dominant theme in every country – but especially so in Japan. Japan’s penetration of organizations who have not started or are just beginning to use cloud native techniques is 18% – triple the rate of India (6%), a country with nearly the same GDP. Even in China, which has a GDP that is more than four times larger than Japan, the not started/just beginning penetration rate is 13%.

There are many challenges to overcome in Asia-Pacific, including the lack of high-speed internet services, the cost to transition systems and staff to cloud computing paradigms, concerns about security, control, and reliability, skills shortages, and a deeply entrenched reliance on legacy systems. However, governmental investment in digital transformation has never been higher, suggesting that the pace of cloud adoption is rapidly changing.

Container use (including those organizations piloting or actively evaluating containers) is greater than 90% and more than 90% of organizations where much, or nearly all, of their app development and deployment is cloud native rely on containers containers.

However, using containers is not without challenges.Security is the leading challenge as reported by 40% of organizations who potentially or are generally consumers of cloud services.

Monitoring and observability are fast becoming more challenging, especially for systems with large numbers of containers. Running containers at scale requires real-time data collection of metrics, events, and logs in order to support proactive system management, so it’s not surprising that projects like Prometheus and Open Telemetry were more widely adopted in 2023. (See: Project Penetration trends upwards across incubating and graduating projects.)