Kubernetes Hits Mainstream: Key Insights from CNCF’s 2021 Cloud‑Native Survey

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) released its sixth annual cloud‑native survey, showing Kubernetes has finally become mainstream.

2021 Cloud‑Native Survey shows 96% of organizations are using or evaluating the technology, fully accepted by large enterprises. The subtitle is “Kubernetes crossing the chasm in a year”.

Priyanka Sharma, CNCF Executive Director, said: “Kubernetes usage in the expanding cloud‑native community is approaching 100%, indicating strong interest and excitement for the future. Our data also shows how pervasive cloud‑native is, whether on‑premises or hosted. I believe 2022 will be a landmark year for emerging cloud‑native areas such as edge, observability, and security.”

The new version of the report is the first to include input from CNCF members Datadog and New Relic, as well as independent analyst SlashData, which previously collaborated with CNCF on developer‑focused cloud‑native reports.

According to the report, 5.6 million developers used Kubernetes in the past 12 months, a 67% increase from the previous year, representing 31% of all backend developers.

The data support three main conclusions:

Adoption of containers and Kubernetes has truly become mainstream, especially among large enterprises.

With this established status, Kubernetes is now moving under The hood similar to Linux, with more organizations using managed services and packaged platforms.

CNCF is seeing some organizations climb higher, adopting less mature projects to address challenges such as monitoring and communication.

The phrase under The hood means Kubernetes is becoming less visible, especially as more organizations use serverless and managed services, turning it into an ubiquitous underlying container technology, much like Linux across devices.

According to CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk, people find it increasingly hard to understand that Kubernetes and containers are a bundled deal. CNCF announced that nearly 90% of Kubernetes users now use cloud‑hosted services, up from about 70% in 2020.

The survey also notes that 79% of respondents use certified managed platforms.

One quote from the report states: “We see a steady increase in the gap between container usage (93%) and Kubernetes usage (96%) over the past year. People seem to understand less that these technologies are a bundled deal. Kubernetes has risen so quickly from a niche technology to an everywhere technology that users often don’t realize they are using it.” This is described as moving up the stack, meaning organizations are increasingly leveraging Kubernetes APIs, runtimes such as CRI‑O and containerd, and monitoring tools like Prometheus.

However, as Kubernetes begins to disappear under the hood, awareness of broader cloud‑native technologies also seems to decline. Compared with production data from Datadog and New Relic, CNCF’s responses highlight this discrepancy.

Key data points include:

Argo, an open‑source Kubernetes‑native workflow engine, saw a 115% year‑over‑year increase in production usage.

Container runtime CRI‑O grew 51% YoY in production.

New Relic reported a 43% overall increase in Prometheus adoption in the last six months of 2021.

FluentD adoption grew 53% over the past year.

Datadog reported a 500% rapid increase in companies using containerd from 2020 to 2021.

Envoy usage grew 39% from January 2020 to January 2021.

The report concludes: “This is an emerging trend; comparing the results of CNCF’s upcoming 2022 survey with today’s cloud‑native landscape will be especially interesting.”

References

2021 Cloud‑Native Survey: https://www.cncf.io/reports/cncf-annual-survey-2021/

This issue: https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2022/01/04/cloud-native-development.aspx

State of Cloud‑Native Development Report: https://www.cncf.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Q1-2021-State-of-Cloud-Native-development-FINAL.pdf

Announcement: https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2022/02/10/cncf-sees-record-kubernetes-and-container-adoption-in-2021-cloud-native-survey/

Article reposted by Jinji Cloud‑Native (copyright belongs to the original author, please delete if infringed).