Results for Red Hat’s Kubernetes fleet management survey

Kubernetes won. It is officially the backbone of modern enterprise infrastructure. At Red Hat, we are celebrating this open source milestone because Kubernetes is the trusted core engine built right into Red Hat OpenShift. When open source wins, our enterprise communities win too.

But according to Red Hat's new State of Kubernetes Fleet Management report, that success has a flip side. A staggering 85% of organizations scaled their cluster fleets over the past year, and 70% now run workloads across multiple cloud providers.

Kubernetes grew up. Enterprise operations got left holding the bag.

The rapid expansion has triggered an execution gap. Organizations are scaling fast without a mature enough strategy to handle the situation. The result? Operational drag. Managing the complexities of Kubernetes fleets is breaking some ops teams.

Operating in the dark

The data exposes a painful truth: We lack real control. Only 17% of IT leaders report having real-time visibility across all their clusters. Because teams cannot see what they are managing, configuration drift now plagues 76% of organizations. In fact, 4 out of 5 infrastructure issues trace straight back to configuration or change management failures.

When the operational pressure cooks, defined governance goes out the window. Statistics show that 75% of operators admit they regularly override their own security policies just to keep services running.

Your teams are paying the price for this ad-hoc setup. Engineers are burning 65% of their day firefighting urgent, unplanned issues. They are context-switching between fragmented tools constantly, and 57% are facing flat-out burnout. This is not just an infrastructure headache: 62% of IT leaders state that Kubernetes complexity is actively stalling critical business initiatives.

The shift to policy-driven predictability

The report reveals a sharp divide between reactive operators and mature, policy-driven fleet managers. While only 12% of reactive teams feel confident managing Kubernetes predictably, 89% of policy-driven operators run their fleets with total confidence (and suffer 3x fewer service disruptions).

To move from reactive firefighting to absolute control, you need three things: Centralized visibility, automated lifecycle management, and consistent policy enforcement.

That is exactly why we built Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management acts as your team's unified control plane to manage, observe, and operate your entire hybrid and multicloud fleet from one central console. Whether you run Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Microsoft Azure AKS, Google GKE, or another CNCF conformant distribution, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management replaces tool fragmentation with a single source of truth.

• Unified fleet observability: Gain a comprehensive, real-time view of your entire fleet's health to isolate and resolve root causes before your customers ever notice a glitch.
• Automated lifecycle management: Multi-cluster provisioning and Day 2 operations (like cluster upgrades and scaling) happen automatically, wiping out manual, error-prone scripts.
• Guardrails, not roadblocks: Define governance, security, and compliance policies once, and automatically enforce them across every environment to kill configuration drift for good.
• Intelligent workload placement: Automatically deploy applications across clusters based on capacity. If a cluster fails, your apps automatically redeploy to keep the business moving.

Stop letting manual overhead stall your product roadmap. Give your platform teams their nights and weekends back.

Read the full report.

Learn more about Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.