The use of containers in cloud production globally has increased to 92% this year, a number that has tripled since 2016.
At the same time, Kubernetes use in production has increased to 83%, up from 78% over the previous year, revealed the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in their latest annual survey, released at the KubeConCloudNative 2020 virtual conference in the US.
CNCF said that there has been more than a 50% increase in cloud projects over the last year. In the use of cloud native tools, 82% of respondents are using CI/CD pipelines and 30% serverless technologies in production.
Public cloud continued to be the most popular data centre approach for the third straight year. It increased slightly in usage from last year (64%, up from 62%). Private cloud or on-premise usage had the most significant increase (52%, up from 45%). Hybrid decreased slightly (36% down from 38%). Multi-cloud usage, a new survey option this year, accounted for 26%.
"Hybrid cloud refers to the use of a combination of on-premises and public cloud," the survey explains. "Multi-cloud means using workloads across different clouds based on the type of cloud that fits the workload best. The portability that Kubernetes and cloud native tools provide makes it much simpler to switch from one public cloud vendor to another. The addition of multi-cloud as an option this year does not necessarily explain the drop in hybrid unless respondents use a different definition."
The CNCF end user community comprises more than 140 companies. A total 1,324 members took part in the survey, aimed at understanding where and how cloud native technologies are being adopted globally.
In a SiliconANGLE report on the conference, author Jason English said: “The flexibility of deploying on the abstracted infrastructure of Kubernetes has become a rallying force for contributions to all projects within the cloud native movement, bringing together open-source development contributors, vendors, service providers and users who want to build and deliver more resilient software anywhere.
“As management tools and managed services get easier to use, cloud native abstraction will continue to move onward, beyond infrastructure, to modernise every aspect of applications.”