In tune with the spreading spirit of introspection during lockdown, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation has pushed out a State of Cloud Native Development report, providing insight into the spread of serverless and who uses Kubernetes where.
The paper is based on a more general survey analyst firm SlashData held between June and August 2019, which is said to have reached more than 17,000 respondents. The CNCF commissioned report apparently focuses on the replies of 6,752 developers who answered questions about creating backend services and the technologies used in the process.
It comes as a supplement to the foundation’s own research, which is useful to get an insight about the cloud native space, but suffers a bit from the fact that the CNCF survey tends to only reach people already somehow associated with the organisation.
Though SlashData’s report isn’t completely clear on how it arrives at this conclusion, it estimates that the number of developers focussing on cloud native scenarios can be put at 4.7 million, which by its measures means 36 per cent of backend developers in general.
Of those, 2.9 million use orchestration, while 3.3 million build their products on cloud functions or serverless architectures. The overlap between both groups is estimated to be 1.5 million, which would suggest orchestration in the serverless space has still some way to go.
Looking more closely at the serverless-using part of the respondents, most seem to opt for AWS Lambda (51 per cent), although being aware of Google Cloud Functions, which speaks to 30 per cent of devs, or the Azure counterpart (26 per cent). Reasons for that seem to be the service’s perceived ease of use and scalability.
According to the survey, Eastern Europe, Russia and former CIS countries lead the list of container adopters with around 54 per cent of backend devs making use of the tech. This is followed by around half of all backend developers in North America, and Western Europe (and Israel), while orchestration is used by 25-26 per cent in both regions.
“Developers in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are slower to adopt containers and cloud native technologies,” SlashData finds, though the company suggests that growing interest in Alibaba’s container as a service offering could change that for the east Asian market.
In terms of platforms, 58 per cent of the considered developers are said to run backend code on a public cloud (mostly AWS), while 36 per cent go for a hybrid setup, and since people could go for more than one option, 47 per cent also indicated they deploy to private clouds and on-premises servers respectively.
With Kubernetes being the crowning project of the CNCF, the report of course also looks into usage of the orchestrator. SlashData’s findings declare 60 per cent of the respondent developers using orchestration tools to be Kubernetes users, while 10 per cent are unaware of the project. The rest know it’s out there but go for other options which are mostly Docker Swarm or various container-as-a-service platforms, which shows that the results here have to be taken with some caution, since quite a few of them use Kubernetes under the hood.