Top concerns for operating cloud-native technologies

Platform9 announced the results of its research, revealing that 91% of survey respondents cite security, consistent management across environments, high availability, and observability as their top concerns for operating cloud-native technologies. The research also found that despite fast growing public-cloud deployments, 67% of cloud deployments are distributed, spread out across on-premises, hybrid, and edge clouds.

The report, which surveyed over 500 technology executives and practitioners, details how enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies, provides insight into 2022 technology investment priorities, and identifies top concerns to help business leaders and enterprises determine how best to navigate and accelerate their cloud-native initiatives for the rest of the year.

The state of cloud-native technologies adoption

• Kubernetes dominates container management: App containerization is accelerating, with 53% of respondents planning to containerize their current applications. Nearly 85% of respondents are using Kubernetes or have plans to deploy it in the next six months.
• Cloud-native hiring continues to be a priority: DevOps, cloud platform engineering, cloud-native developers, and security are the top hiring investments for 2022.
• Executives across the board are looking for practical solutions to reduce vendor lock-in: While 61% of respondents have high or moderate concern about vendor lock-in, 71% of advanced users with larger deployments are even more concerned than early users. Additionally, managers, executives, and architects show higher level of concerns than engineers (65%). Plans for multiple cloud deployment lead as the number one action to address cloud lock-in, followed by using open-source services (#2) and writing portable apps (#3).
• While security and operations concerned 91% of respondents, executives were more concerned about cost optimization, data management, and high availability while practitioner’s challenges were more around day-2 operations such as upgrades, consistent management, observability, and troubleshooting.

“As more and more enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies, we see a corresponding growth of the deployment of distributed infrastructure across public, hybrid, and edge clouds,” said Bhaskar Gorti, CEO of Platform9.

“What many fail to anticipate when implementing a distributed cloud strategy, are the challenges that come with managing it efficiently, and the high skill-level needed to do so. It’s critical that leaders prioritize a cloud-agnostic provider in order to achieve their goals faster and with less complexity, while minimizing the vendor lock-in concerns identified in the research.”

“We’ve seen that there is a high-level of concern among enterprises when it comes to consistent management across clusters, uptime and SLA, cost optimization, and troubleshooting, yet there is a major gap in knowing how to actually solve for these challenges,” said Madhura Maskasky, VP of product at Platform9.

“Hearing from various industry experts on the emerging cloud-native solutions available to address these issues will enable these companies to gain a comprehensive understanding of operating their deployments effectively, especially at distributed scale.”