CNCF Annual Survey Report: 15 Interesting Cloud-Native Trends

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) published the results of its annual survey conducted in October 2019. Of the 1,337 respondents, 37% were from Europe, 38% from North America, and 17% from Asia. Respondents included architects, DevOps managers, and backend developers.

Here are 15 interesting takeaways from the CNCF annual survey:

1. Kubernetes usage in production surged

Compared with last year, Kubernetes usage in production increased sharply. 78% of respondents use Kubernetes in production, a significant jump from 58% last year. Many organizations that were testing Kubernetes last year moved their workloads into production, which also reduced the share of respondents still evaluating it.

2. Many run 2–5 Kubernetes clusters in production

43% of respondents said they run between 2 and 5 Kubernetes clusters in production. This number is expected to grow in the coming months.

3. Public cloud is the preferred destination; hybrid cloud is gaining momentum

Most respondents (62%) run workloads in the public cloud, while the rest run in hybrid environments. With Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud platforms accelerating adoption, we expect hybrid cloud usage to increase next year.

4. Containers are mainstreaming into production

According to CNCF, 84% of respondents use containers in production—up from 73% in 2018 and 23% in the first survey conducted in 2016. Given the interest in microservices, this surge is not surprising.

5. Amazon EKS leads, followed by GKE and AKS

AWS remains the top choice for running containers and Kubernetes. 29% of respondents use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Among the 17% who use kops to provision clusters on Amazon EC2, AWS is also the leading cloud for Kubernetes. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is close behind, with 28% using it as their CaaS. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), together with the legacy ACS engine, has around 25% adoption.

6. Cultural challenges remain a major barrier

The top challenges in adopting cloud-native technologies include cultural change, security, complexity, readiness, and monitoring.

7. Istio is the leading service mesh among early adopters

CNCF introduced service mesh as a new survey category. Only 18% of respondents use a service mesh in production, while 47% are evaluating it. Istio is the most popular service mesh platform, followed by Consul. Consul sees relatively higher production usage because it supports a variety of use cases; many deployments use Consul as a key/value store rather than as a service mesh.

8. Block storage in public cloud is the de facto storage engine As stateful workloads become mainstream on Kubernetes, storage becomes critical. Since most workloads run in the public cloud, it’s not surprising that cloud block storage services are the preferred backend for stateful production workloads. （CNCF：Storage Choices）

9. AWS Lambda is the most popular FaaS platform

Although not directly tied to Kubernetes, many organizations use Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) alongside containers. AWS Lambda leads by a wide margin, with Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions in second and third place.
（CNCF：Serverless Platforms）

10. Knative ranks #1 among Kubernetes-based serverless platforms

Event-driven serverless frameworks on Kubernetes are increasingly popular. 34% of respondents voted for Knative as the most popular serverless framework, followed by OpenFaaS, Kubeless, and Virtual Kubelet.
（CNCF：Serverless on Kubernetes）

11. Helm is the preferred tool for packaging Kubernetes applications

Helm is often described as an “easy install” mechanism for Kubernetes. It’s not surprising that Helm is the most popular packaging tool for Kubernetes.
（CNCF：Packaging Choices）

12. Nginx is the leading Ingress provider

Most Kubernetes users rely on Nginx/Nginx Plus as their Ingress. Envoy is also growing rapidly as a standalone ingress option.
（CNCF：Ingress Usage）

13. Minikube is the most popular Kubernetes environment

Minikube remains a favorite way for developers to run Kubernetes locally. Even though Docker Desktop embeds Kubernetes, many developers still prefer Minikube.
（CNCF：Kubernetes Dev Environment）

14. Prometheus and CoreDNS are the fastest-growing CNCF projects

Among CNCF graduated projects, Prometheus and CoreDNS are growing the fastest after Kubernetes. CoreDNS provides name resolution for clusters, while Prometheus has become the de facto standard for collecting and aggregating metrics.
（CNCF：CNCF Projects）

15. etcd is the most widely used CNCF incubating project

Kubernetes clusters rely on an in-memory distributed database to maintain state. The incubating etcd project can be found in almost every Kubernetes deployment. Many projects and applications depend on etcd because of its small footprint and simplified operations.
（CNCF：CNCF Incubation Projects）