The State of

Kubernetes 2020
Presented by: VMware
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

Introduction
Enterprises are adopting Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies to increase agility,
accelerate software delivery, and support digital transformation. Since it was open sourced in
2014, Kubernetes has become the orchestration platform of choice for containers, simplifying the
work of both developers and operators. Developers find Kubernetes to be a practical framework
for application development and management, while operators appreciate how Kubernetes
increases resource utilization and helps overcome the limitations of ticket-based management.

With this study, we wanted to understand how enterprises are using Kubernetes today, and to
identify challenges they face in making the best use of the technology. We also examined some
of the benefits that Kubernetes delivers for key stakeholders.

This report is divided up into four sections:

It’s Still Early People Come First Bumps on the Road Kubernetes Is Worth It
Kubernetes is young and Kubernetes brings more to Success Developer benefits accelerate
enterprise adoption is in the stakeholders to the table. software delivery.
Deployment and management are not
early stages. without challenges.

2
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

Demographics
REGION PRIMARY JOB RESPONSIBILITY
Our study was limited to companies with 1,000 or more employees, and
United States or Canada (68%) IT Operators (25%)
that are currently using Kubernetes. VMware commissioned Dimensional
Research to conduct the study to understand the experiences and
Architecture (12%)
attitudes among the individuals responsible for adoption and use of
Europe (21%)
Kubernetes in each organization. The resulting research effort tapped a
DevOps (7%)
total of 247 qualified individuals, all with responsibility over Kubernetes.
Asia (4%) Latin America (4%)
A wide range of roles, industries, regions, and job levels are represented.
Software Development (14%)

All the organizations surveyed have a significant software development Australia or New Zealand (1%) Middle East or Africa (2%)
footprint. About 29% have between 100 and 1,000 developers, 11% have Infrastructure (23%)

1,000 to 2,500 developers, and 24% have more than 2,500 developers.
COMPANY SIZE (# OF EMPLOYEES)
Product Management (6%)
Our sample skews toward technology companies (22%) and financial More than 10,000 (38%)
services companies (13%), but all major sectors are represented, Site Reliability (2%)
including education (7%), manufacturing (7%), and healthcare (5%).
5,000 - 10,000 (13%)
NUMBER OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS

1,000 - 5,000 (49%)

More than 2,500 (24%)

1,000 - 2,500 (11%)

JOB LEVEL

Team Manager (39%)

500 - 1,000 (11%)

Senior Individual Contributor (28%) 100 - 500 (18%)

Executive (19%) 10 - 100 (26%)

Developer, Admin, or Other Frontline Staff (14%) Less than 10 (11%)

3
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

60%
are running less than
half of containerized
It’s Still Early workloads on Kubernetes

Given all the attention that Kubernetes has received, it’s easy to overlook the
fact that the technology is still very young. Although the technology is
maturing and use cases are expanding at a rapid pace, Kubernetes is just 5
years old. 57%
are running fewer than

Enterprises Are Just Beginning to 10 Kubernetes clusters

Adopt Kubernetes
It’s early days for enterprise Kubernetes adoption. More than half of respondents
(57%) are operating fewer than 10 Kubernetes clusters, and 60% are running
59%
less than half of their containerized workloads on Kubernetes. Early adopters of respondents are running
of container technologies relied on other container orchestration tools (or no Kubernetes in production
orchestration at all), and these environments remain in place. However, expect to
see them supplanted by Kubernetes in the coming years. Kubernetes has all the
momentum on its side.
20%
of those with Kubernetes
But Production Deployment is Strong in production have 50 or
Early adopters are recognizing real benefits, and 59% of respondents are running more clusters
Kubernetes in production. Of those, one-third (33%) are operating 26 clusters or
more. One-fifth (20%) are running more than 50 clusters.

4
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

On-premises Deployments
Dominate
While Kubernetes is associated with cloud native operations, the majority of
enterprise deployments today are not in the public cloud. Of the companies
surveyed, a large majority (64%) have deployed Kubernetes on-premises.

This result was surprising; we expected public cloud deployments to

demonstrate a clear lead. We interpret this to mean that enterprises most
often get started with Kubernetes on existing infrastructure, likely taking
advantage of established virtual environments.
Where has your organization deployed Kubernetes?
If you are just getting started, consider introducing Kubernetes into your
Choose all that apply.
existing infrastructure to gain experience—and immediate benefits.

On-premises 64%

“Cloud native isn’t about where you A single public

operate, it’s how you operate.” cloud vendor 42%

– Joe Beda, Principal Engineer, VMware and co-creator

Multiple public cloud
of Kubernetes vendor 31%

Distributed edge 10%

locations

5
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

People Come First

One of the things that has contributed to Kubernetes’ success is that it delivers Other significant benefits include enabled moving to the cloud (42%) and
clear benefits for multiple stakeholders. Some technologies benefit operations reduced public cloud costs (33%). One of the strengths of Kubernetes is that
teams, and some benefit development teams, but not many benefit both. you can run clusters both on-premises and in the cloud, and move
Kubernetes is a technology that everyone can get behind. containerized workloads easily between them. Kubernetes running in the
public cloud utilizes resources both efficiently and elastically, helping to
control costs.
Kubernetes Has Benefits for
Multiple Stakeholders What benefits has your organization realized from
operating Kubernetes?
Of survey respondents, 95% reported seeing clear benefits from adopting
Kubernetes. The top two benefits selected were improved resource utilization, Choose all that apply.
chosen by 56% of those surveyed, and shortened software development cycles,
Improved resource utilization 56%
chosen by 53%.
Shortened software development cycles 53%
Resource efficiency is an important KPI for operations teams, while faster
development obviously helps developers, making Kubernetes a solution that Containerized monolithic applications 50%

operations and development teams can agree on. And delivering new software
Enabled our move to the cloud 42%
features more quickly, while controlling IT spending, is the holy grail of the digital age.
So these benefits extend to the company as a whole. Reduced public cloud costs 33%

Other 2%

We have not realized any benefits 5%

6
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

Everyone Wants a Seat at the Table

Because so many stakeholders have a vested interest in the success of Kubernetes, The primary decision-maker varies from organization to organization, depending
everyone wants a seat at the table when it’s time to make decisions. Eighty-three in part on whether Kubernetes is running in development or production.
percent of respondents said more than one team is involved in choosing a Kubernetes Development teams are the primary decision makers 38% of the time when
distribution. It’s worth noting that C-level executives are involved 18% of the time. We Kubernetes is deployed only for development, while infrastructure teams are the
think this involvement is occurring because enterprises are choosing their next primary decision makers 23% of the time in production environments.
generation platform, and that earns executive attention.

What teams are involved in selecting Kubernetes distributions for use?

Choose all that apply.

Development team 65%

Infrastructure team 60%

Platform or cloud architect 53%

83% IT operations team

Applcation owner 20%

50%

of respondants say multiple teams C-level executive (CIO,CTO) 18%

are involved in selecting a
Other 3%
Kubernetes distribution

7
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

Decision-making Gets More

Complicated
With more stakeholders at the table, complications arise. 40% of survey
respondents cited a lack of internal alignment as a problem when selecting
a Kubernetes distribution. Clearly, Kubernetes creates an opportunity to
bring operators and developers closer together, but this has not been fully
realized inside many companies. Companies adopting Kubernetes and other
40% cited lack of internal
cloud native technologies might find it necessary to make adjustments to alignment as a challenge when
organizational structure and company culture to achieve the best results. selecting a Kubernetes distribution
The top decision-making challenge chosen by respondents was lack of
internal experience and expertise, but this is to be expected with almost any
significant new technology.

Look for partners with the expertise to help guide the decision-making
process and balance competing IT priorities to offset a lack of experience in
your organization.

8
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

Bumps on the Road to Success

70% 70%
67% 70%
67% 67%
Once a Kubernetes distribution is selected, enterprises encounter more 64% 64% 64%
complexities than they bargained for—both during and after deployment.

Lack of Experience and Expertise

Lack of experience and expertise creates challenges for Kubernetes
deployment and management, just as it does for selecting a distribution. And
this gap was named as the top challenge for both Kubernetes deployment
and management, chosen by 70% and 67% of respondents, respectively.
Cited lack of experience Cited lack of experience Chose ease-of-use as
Given these statistics, it’s not surprising that ease-of-use tops the list of
and expertise as the top and expertise as the top their top Kubernetes
selection criteria for Kubernetes (64%). Other top selection criteria included deployment challenge management challenge selection criterion
product capabilities and roadmap (57%), avoiding lock-in (45%), and services
and support (38%).

Given the lack of experience and expertise, it’s critical that Kubernetes be Ripple Effects
packaged in a way that simplifies enterprise adoption. This means integrating
more easily with existing infrastructure and processes, and operating in Lack of experience has significant ripple effects that impact other
concert with existing services and tools. aspects of a Kubernetes deployment. Almost half (49%) cited integrating
with current infrastructure as a deployment challenge, while 46% had
trouble meeting security and compliance requirements after deployment.

9
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

Kubernetes is Worth It
We started by noting that it’s early in the life of Kubernetes. Despite potential
disagreements among groups and the need to gain experience and expertise, it’s clear

Executives

Developers

Developers
Executives
that enterprises are moving forward with Kubernetes. And they are putting so much
energy into the pursuit of this technology in order to accelerate software development.

Infrastructure Access is Critical to 49%

Developer Success 29% 29%

There is a clear shift across all industries from a preoccupation with infrastructure to a laser
focus on application development. It’s imperative that companies increase developer
productivity, shorten the path to production, and accelerate the cadence of new features
and services. 6%

There appears to be a significant disconnect between what company executives view as the
impediments to developer productivity and the way frontline developers see the world. 46%
of executives think the biggest impediment to developers is integrating new technology into Integration of new and Access to infrastructure is
existing systems. Meanwhile, developers themselves cite waiting for central IT to provide existing technology is the the biggest impediment to
access to infrastructure as a top impediment (29%), while only 6% of executives recognize biggest impediment to developer productivity
infrastructure access as an impediment. developer productivity

10
T H E S TAT E O F K U B E R N E T E S 2 0 2 0

Kubernetes Democratizes
Resource Access
Kubernetes helps developers gain access to infrastructure, which is one of the things that
attracts them to the technology. More than half of developers surveyed (55%) have self-
service access to Kubernetes resources. Among them, 43% said that with Kubernetes they
run their own independent infrastructure, while 28% of their peers are still filing tickets and 55%
waiting to get access to the resources they need.

Easy access to resources is crucial for developer success, but there are many additional
reasons that developers like Kubernetes. These include its inherent resilience,
repeatability, flexibility, and visibility. Because Kubernetes is flexible rather than
prescriptive, it adapts to a wide range of developer needs.

55% of developers have self-service

access to Kubernetes resources,
accelerating development

11
Summary and
Recommendations
If your organization is contemplating Kubernetes or doing a proof-of-
concept or trial deployment, what lessons should you take away from this
survey? More than half of organizations surveyed have fewer than 10 clusters
deployed. Nevertheless, 59% are using Kubernetes in production. Even at small
scale, Kubernetes benefits the enteprises that use it. However, usage tends to
grow fast: 53% of production users are running 26 or more clusters.

A surprising 64% are running Kubernetes on-premises. This is an important

reminder that cloud native doesn’t mean public–cloud-only. Enterprises are
kicking off Kubernetes operations in the environments where they operate
today. Deploying Kubernetes on existing infrastructure can yield immediate
benefits and may be less disruptive to your operations as a whole.

While organizations surveyed are working through some pain points as they
gain experience and build expertise, on the whole respondents clearly believe
it’s worth it. To help offset a lack of experience in your organization, look for
partners with the expertise to help with solution selection. A Kubernetes
distribution should be packaged in a way that simplifies enterprise adoption
and integrates easily with existing infrastructure. An ideal partner can also help
with deployment and management, and can understand and help balance
competing IT priorities.

Interested in talking to an expert about your Kubernetes strategy?

Get in touch

12