Rancher Labs Industry Survey Highlights Rapid Adoption of Kubernetes for Production Workloads

Rancher Labs, creators of the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform, today released highlights of a survey of 1,106 tech users at large and small enterprises across a broad range of more than 25 industries, including technology, financial services, telecom, education, government and healthcare. The respondents were almost evenly split among EMEA and North America. 

“It’s clear from the survey results that containers have become a key pillar of modern IT strategy with 85% of respondents running containers in production,” said Peter Smails, CMO, Rancher Labs. “Additionally, 91% of respondents running more than one cluster combined with a healthy mix of on-premises and cloud-based deployments indicates multi-cluster / multi-cloud is emerging as a deployment strategy of choice.”

Survey Highlights

The results of the survey illustrate rapid adoption of containers and Kubernetes.  Key findings include:

• 85% of respondents are running containers in production
• Kubernetes has emerged as the standard for container management with 90% of respondents using it for orchestration
• Architects, developers, and DevOps are the primary drivers of adoption (69%) followed by IT Operations (30%)
• Multiple cluster environments are becoming the norm with 91% of respondents running multiple clusters, and 45% planning multiple clusters within six months.
• The most common use cases for containers today are designing microservices (71%), building customer facing applications (70%), and modernizing legacy applications (53%)
• Hybrid cloud deployments are prevalent with 71% of respondents running on-premises workloads while 67% are running cloud-based applications
• Edge is emerging as an important use-case with 15% of respondents deploying containers for edge workloads

Challenges Remain

As with any rapidly emerging technology, the survey also indicates that challenges remain, including:

• Complexity remains a barrier to entry with more than 62% of respondents not currently running containers citing that as the primary reason slowing adoption.
• Windows container adoption is limited, although this is not surprising given Windows container support was only introduced in Kubernetes earlier this year
• Users are still wary of persistent storage due to complexity and perceived risk
• Service mesh is also perceived as complex which is limiting more widespread adoption

Key findings from the survey are available in an infographic you can download, here. 

If you are attending KubeCon in San Diego, you can also learn more about the results of the survey by visiting Rancher Labs in booth P19.