The cloud native world is in rude health and heading towards serverless, with AWS Lambda continuing to dominate the field, according to the CNCF’s latest pulse-taking exercise.

The organisation’s bi-annual survey also showed that production usage of the projects it oversees had grown more than 200 per cent over the last six months, with 73 per cent of respondents using containers in production.

Whatever your definition of serverless, the CNCF found that 38 per cent of the organisations it surveyed were using some form of it, up from 31 per cent in the last survey, while another 26 per cent planned to use it in the next 12 to 18 months.

Of those, 32 per cent were using a hosted platform, with AWS Lambda being used by 70 per cent. Google Cloud Functions was being used by 25 per cent, up from 13 per cent, while Azure Functions was used by 20 per cent, up from 12 per cent.

Around 6 per cent of firms preferred to use an installable serverless platform (remember what we said about different definitions of serverless), with Kubeless (closely associated to Kubernetes and therefore the CNCF) being the favourite – used by 42 per cent of this group, up from 2 per cent. Apache Openwhisk was up from 12 per cent to 25 per cent, and OpenFaas up from 10 per cent to 20 per cent

The survey noted that the CNCF’s CloudEvents project – an effort to evolve a common way of describing events data – was being evaluated by 80 per cent of respondents, and 21 per cent using it in production.

When it comes to using Cloud Native technologies, the key challenges appear to be human, rather than technical. Cultural changes with the development team was the most cited issue, at 41 per cent, with complexity cited by 40 per cent, up from 35 per cent. Lack of training also irked 40 per cent.

When it came to non-human factors, security was cited by 38 per cent, down from 43 per cent, monitoring by 34 per cent down from 38 per cent. Storage and networking were both cited by 30 per cent of respondents, down from 41 per cent and 38 per cent respectively.

Other highlights included:

• 20 per cent of respondents are deploying software releases weekly, and 15 per cent are releasing daily. 18 per cent are managing monthly releases
• 42 per cent of releases are automated, with just 27 per cent doing manual releases
• 73 per cent of respondents are using containers in production, with the remainder planning to use them in the future
• While 29 per cent of respondents are running less than 50 containers, 15 per cent are running more than 5000.

Kubernetes dominates container management, being used by 83 per cent of respondents. Amazon ECS is used by 24 per cent, 21 per cent use Docker Swarm, and 20 per cent use Shell Scripts

One last point, if none of this reflects your experience, the respondents were overwhelmingly drawn from the technology and software industries, 22 per cent each, while container or cloud solutions vendors accounted for another 6 per cent. The next three biggest industries were financial services (9 per cent), telecoms (8 per cent) and consulting (6 per cent).