Kubernetes proficiency surges as Loft Labs highlights trends

A survey conducted by Loft Labs has revealed increasing proficiency in Kubernetes usage, highlighting a significant reliance on the technology among large, distributed organisations.

The 2024 vCluster Community Survey, which polled over 125 respondents, underscores an emerging interest in advanced Kubernetes management approaches as a means to reduce costs and operational complexity.

The results point to Kubernetes becoming a foundational technology for most surveyed, showing only a narrow lead for Docker in development environments but significantly trailing behind Kubernetes for production uses. Over half of the respondents, 57%, are splitting their Kubernetes management between Azure AKS and AWS EKS for development, with 68% doing so in production. Usage of heavy platform stack components such as ingress (82%), monitoring and observability tools (66% and 67% respectively), and secret managers (62%) were also commonly reported.

According to Loft Labs, their flagship product, vCluster, offers a novel layer of virtualization for Kubernetes by making clusters lightweight and ephemeral. "We conducted this vCluster Community Survey to more deeply understand how our users are interacting with Kubernetes; where and why they are deploying clusters; and how we can best support their needs as we continue to add new capabilities," said Lukas Gentele, Loft Co-Founder and CEO. He noted that large-scale enterprises, in particular, can benefit from the reduced operational load and increased efficiency that vCluster provides.

The survey also found that the most common use cases for Kubernetes deployment are within microservices architecture (86%), DevOps and CI/CD workflows (83%), and web application hosting (66%). These findings suggest that innovative approaches like virtual clusters could significantly enhance collaboration and resource efficiency due to their capacity to ensure workload isolation.

One key insight from the survey is the experience level of vCluster users, who tend to be highly experienced and employed at large organisations. Approximately 72% of respondents have over eight years of work experience, and nearly 60% have more than ten years. Most respondents work at organisations with over 1,000 employees, highlighting the substantial value enterprises see in virtual clusters given their large-scale Kubernetes workloads and the associated costs.

The survey also reported that 75% of respondents run Kubernetes clusters through public cloud providers, with nearly 50% using private data centres and managed Kubernetes services. However, only 19% of users reported running multi-cloud deployments, a strategy that can mitigate vendor lock-in and facilitate better cost management. Multi-cloud deployments allow organisations to choose the best pricing models and identify the most valuable products and services for their operations.

Proficiency levels among Kubernetes users are solidifying, with 57% ranking their skills highly, either a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5. However, confidence in managing virtual clusters is still catching up, with 30% ranking their skills at a 3, 29% at a 4, and 33% at the lower end of the scale. This disparity indicates that while more engineers are becoming adept at leveraging Kubernetes, understanding and managing virtual clusters remains an evolving competency. "We see that vCluster can provide tremendous value to lighten the stack and operational load, particularly for large-scale enterprises. At the same time, there is room to grow in terms of educating our user base on the benefits of Kubernetes virtualization," Gentele added.

Loft Labs has emphasised its commitment to continually improving its offerings based on user feedback. The vCluster product has garnered substantial adoption in the open-source community and among paying customers, with over 40 million virtual clusters created to date. As cloud-native environments continue to expand, virtualization is expected to play a critical role in maintaining secure Kubernetes multi-tenancy and seamless development experiences, while also aiming to reduce costs.