Results of Kubernetes Adoption Survey Show it’s Everywhere

Red Hat and Cockroach Labs have been working together to perform a survey of 202 enterprise architects, CTOs and senior grade engineers. The goal has been to determine how they are using Kubernetes, and where they are in their adoption journey. Of those 202 surveyed, 94% were using Kubernetes, but it's how they use it where things start to diverge.

For those users of Kubernetes, 46% said that data-intensive workloads are their first priority in Kubernetes, and almost half of those folks said that transactional workloads were a concern. Another priority was the migration of complex workloads, which was cited by 44% of those in the survey.

And while the road to cloud is often paved with SaaS, of the 202 respondents, 95% said they manage their own cloud IT infrastructure. Beyond that layer of the digital transformation, 88% of our surveyed respondents said that they were embracing serverless workloads and infrastructure as well. Of that number, 39% are already using serverless, while 49% indicated that they are planning to adopt it in the future.

Just over half of those in our survey said they were actively working on their migration to a multi-cloud infrastructure, while 15% have no plans, and the rest are expecting to be using multi-cloud within 3 to 12 months.

While the traditional wisdom about cloud-based computing has been that transactional databases aren’t the sort to be cloud-ified, it turns out that 59% of the folks in our survey who are using transactional and analytic workloads in their Kubernetes installations. 28% are running transactional only, and 13% are running analytical workloads only.

Teams are also showing that managing Kubernetes internally is the preferred way to run it. 95% of those in the survey said they manage their own Kubernetes, with 5% saying they outsource their management.

When we straight out asked why these users were adopting Kubernetes, the answers they gave were clustered together fairly well. Management and orchestration of containers is a noble goal to which most of our respondents aspired, but at 57% it was only barely above other goals, like simplifying operations, modernizing legacy applications and easing deployment across infrastructure.

If you’d like to learn more about the results and what other organizations are planning to do on Kubernetes, register for the Kubernetes Adoption Trends Webinar happening on 9/15.

If you’d like to see more of the results from this survey, head over to the survey results page and register to get the info.