Key Findings from CNCF 2020 China Cloud Native Survey: Serverless, Containers, Service Mesh, and Open‑Source Tools

On April 28, CNCF released its 2020 China Cloud Native Survey, the fourth such survey in China, aiming to help practitioners understand the domestic adoption of cloud native technologies.

The report, based on 439 respondents (49% CNCF end‑user community members), covers a range of enterprise sizes and industries, with software/technology firms accounting for over 60% of participants.

Key serverless findings: 31% of organizations are using serverless in production, 41% are evaluating it, and 12% plan to adopt within 12 months. Among serverless users, 45% rely on managed FaaS platforms (with Alibaba Cloud Function Compute favored by 35% of users) while 20% use installable software such as Knative, Kubeless or OpenWhisk.

Container adoption has accelerated: 68% of respondents run containers in production (up from 49% in 2019), and Kubernetes usage rose from 72% to 82%. Public‑cloud usage increased to 46%.

Service mesh is gaining traction, with 38% of organizations using it in production and 42% evaluating it; Istio, Consul and Linkerd remain the most popular solutions.

Open‑source tooling shows high automation: 73% run CI/CD pipelines, 95% use monitoring tools, and 85% employ distributed tracing. Prometheus usage grew from 57% to 72%.

The survey also highlights challenges such as deployment complexity and security, and notes that China is now the third largest CNCF contributor region after the US and Germany.