Participate in the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations Survey 2023

Canonical has conducted surveys about Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations in the past two years. As a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and an active part of the community, we contribute the anonymised results back, along with our analyses and the insights of industry experts. Everyone can submit an answer anonymously. Respondents only need to provide their contact address when participating in a gift raffle. The reports for 2021 and 2022 are freely available to everyone.

We have also just opened our survey for 2023 at KubeCon NA 2023, so if you want to have your say and contribute insights for the cloud-native community, now’s your chance! Take the survey

during the week of KubeCon NA 2023!

Looking back the past two years

With two surveys completed, we can also observe year-to-year changes. Let’s compare some key observations from the last two years.

From Kubernetes setup to CI/CD pipelining and re-architecting

While in 2021, most people (34%) said they were working on deploying Kubernetes as a service, this dropped to 10% in 2022. This year, most people responded that they were re-architecting a solution for Kubernetes, deploying a CI/CD pipeline or moving to an OSS solution. We can see that more and more organisations have transitioned into the next step of Kubernetes adoption.

Security remains the most relevant selection criteria  for base container images.

The importance of security is not a big surprise, as we have seen many high-impact vulnerabilities reported in mainstream media. Security for container base images was ranked highest for about 55% of people in both years.  The second most important qualities were stability and compliance in 2021 and 2022 respectively, ranked in second place by less than  40% of respondents. Despite all the initiatives, tools, solutions and technologies, the security community did not finish to make vulnerabilities and malware less critical and less of a concern for Kubernetes users. More efforts are required than what is available today to cover security sustainably.

Kubernetes environments are stable

Having almost the same answers in two consecutive survey years does not sound remarkable. However, it is striking that the percentage of people using AWS and Azure remained nearly the same. 

This is an important observation: once a setup is made, it is stable and leads to almost zero observable movements. The constant share of about 15% for OpenStack as a Kubernetes platform in both years confirms this observation: OpenStack is not dead.

Lack of skills remains #1 problem

Again, similar results, but a critical message: Every second person has seen in 2021 and 2022 lack of skills as the #1 challenge for Kubernetes adoption. And more than every third person has seen their organisation’s structure as the second most significant problem in both years. Having  the same result for two years confirms a sustained demand for consulting and know-how to help organisations adopt Kubernetes.

Organisations have evolved to the application level but challenges remain

Comparing the results from two consecutive years shows that organisations went one step further from the deployment and setup of a Kubernetes environment to re-architecting their applications and automating their infrastructure.

However, there are strikingly similar results over the last two years:

• security remains the most important thing to look at, confirming that several issues have not been solved yet.
• Access to talent remains an issue, providing opportunities for vendors and companies to fill the gap.

Our 2023 survey is open!

We’re now running the third edition of this survey for 2023! If you find this helpful and want to contribute to the 2023 report,  you can support it now! The survey is open, so be part of the community and contribute to the freely available results for everyone (responses are kept anonymous):