Since its release in 2015, Kubernetes (also known as k8s) is 7 years old.
In the past seven years, K8s has changed from an obscure "bronze" to a "king" beyond Docker, and has even become the de facto standard in the field of container orchestration, opening the prelude to cloud native.
However, as a technology that has been developed for many years, the future of k8s has also become a topic of concern, in other words, will k8s encounter the "seven-year itch"?
On the occasion of this seventh anniversary, VMware released a report that gives us a glimpse into the development of K8S.
The 2021 Kubernetes Status Report was commissioned by VMware to Divensional Research and surveyed a total of 357 software development and IT professionals.
About 29 percent of the companies surveyed have 100 to 1,000 developers, 11 percent have between 1,000 and 2,500, and 24 percent have more than 2,500 developers.
Among them, technology companies (19%), financial services companies (15%) telecommunications (9%), healthcare (9%) and government (7%).
Modernize the de facto standards of application
Over the years, the most common question about k8s is: How fast is the growth rate of k8s, and is there a lack of follow-up?
According to VMware's Kubernetes 2021 Status Report, 65 percent of respondents said most or all containerized applications in their production environments are running in k8s, up from 59 percent in 2020 and less than a third in 2018.
Companies with more than 500 developers have higher numbers in this survey, with 78 percent of them preferring to run all or most of their containerized workloads in production.
Over the past year, the pandemic has changed the focus of everyone's lives, and the world is struggling to cope with the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, IT departments have been particularly affected, and enterprises need to upgrade and redeploy applications to quickly update their businesses, and increasing the speed at which developers can add functionality to applications is key.
The good news is that organizations are benefiting from K8s, with respondents seeing the biggest benefit as better resource utilization to meet expanding demand.
The report shows that almost all those surveyed (98%) see the huge benefits of k8s. Among them, "improved resource utilization", "simplified application update and maintenance", and "shortened software development cycle" were rated as the biggest benefits of using k8s.
The above data can be seen that K8s has gone through the stage of technological "early adopter", although the growth rate is not as rapid as in the early years, but the continuous shift to production is an important symbol of K8s riding the wind and waves.
However, it should be noted that enterprises still face many challenges in deploying, managing, and using k8s, especially those faced by development and operations personnel.
The challenge of compatibility of new technologies with older systems
As the rate of adoption of k8s within enterprises increases, another challenge is also rising year by year, even approaching half.
Many might argue that the number one obstacle to developer productivity is the lack of automation. But the survey found that the biggest obstacle is "integrating new technologies with existing systems," an option that 42 percent of respondents chose, compared to 35 percent in last year's survey.
This is not only consistent with the situation in recent years, but also clearly shows that as more and more applications are generated in k8s or migrated to k8s, the need to integrate with these existing applications will only increase, and the challenges will become more significant.
In addition, a survey commissioned by VMware and conducted by Forrester Consulting showed that more and more teams are using k8s distributions instead of building, integrating and maintaining their own k8s stacks, known as "DIY". The percentage of respondents who chose to "use DIY k8s" in the survey results decreased significantly, from 29% in 2020 to 18% in 2021.
This result is also obvious, when users build and run their own platform, there must be a need to constantly solve a variety of problems, which is not only the improper use of a company's strategic resources, but also in the long run is rarely successful. Because the real focus of the enterprise is to deliver business value, not to build and consolidate the infrastructure.
Tanzu on VxRail breaks the bottleneck
It can be seen that helping enterprises reduce the gap between k8s and existing systems, while simplifying k8s infrastructure deployment and configuration, and focusing on delivering business value will be the key for enterprises to further break through efficiency and productivity bottlenecks.
That's why Dell Technologies and VMware integrate the VxRail and Tanzu product lines to bring simple, scalable k8s capabilities to the enterprise.
▲ "Solid voice" was played by them
Tanzu is a cloud-native series of product families launched by VMware, it is not a product, but an application-oriented aspect of building, running and managing container applications, a collection of VMware products, and all k8s as the platform, truly combine development and applications, and make VMware in the cloud and container field into one.
With Tanzu, Dell Technologies partnered with VMware to launch the landed product VMware Tanzu on VxRail, the only vendor on the market that offers fully integrated reference architectures and cluster and private cloud integrations that can take full advantage of any IT environment.
Dell EMC VxRail is powered by intel Xeon Scalable processors, which optimize workloads, are highly reliable, and have high computing power, stability and high agility, which not only helps VxRail easily meet the established workloads, but also has great application potential in the cloud.
No matter where you're on your k8s journey, whether you're collaborating with Tanzu for k8s or developing modern applications, you'll benefit from the capabilities of vSAN, vSphere, and the VMware Cloud Foundation to meet your business needs.
01
Rapid deployment and accelerated service launch
VxRail systems are fully integrated at the factory and ready for deployment. VxRail clusters with vSphere with Tanzu enable automated deployments to seamlessly deliver off-the-shelf infrastructure to developers at the speed of the cloud.
Another benefit of VxRail is that it scales easily, adding new nodes to existing clusters non-disruptively in 15 minutes as business needs grow.
02
Flexible way, automatically run k8s
As mentioned earlier, when enterprise users use k8s, the most common challenge is the integration of new and old systems.
In this regard, VxRail and VMware Tanzu synchronize container management and virtualization management at the infrastructure level, allowing IT administrators to use k8s in a familiar vSphere client environment while getting all critical applications up and running at the same time, dramatically reducing the complexity of using k8s and k8s-based developer tools.
At the same time, Dell Technologies is able to deliver k8s the way you want them, with a wide range of options that the industry has:
● Seek reference architecture customers with multiple configurations, including highly available production-ready configurations, with the option of Tanzu Architecture for VxRail, relying on a trusted, proven cloud-native architecture for development on a proven PaaS/CaaS platform;
SDN professional customers who seek network flexibility and low scalability requirements, or have large-scale management k8s, can choose vShere with Tanzu on VxRail to achieve fast, standard VxRail deployment while maintaining existing operating models and network flexibility;
Customers looking for large-scale deployment of k8s can choose VCF with Tanzu on VxRail and adopt k8s on a unified cloud platform to achieve a fully automated, turnkey hybrid cloud.
You can also follow the instructions below
Easily find the infrastructure you need
03
The only commitment to synchronize updates within 30 days
As k8s increasingly enter the production field of enterprises, how to ensure system stability is also the primary consideration of enterprises.
In this regard, whenever VMware releases an HCI software update, Dell Technologies is the only enterprise on the market that promises to synchronize updates within 30 days, bringing bug fixes or enhancements to the business in the first place.
Finally, on the future of K8s, let's summarize by quoting the two founders of K8s, Craig McLuckie (now VMware's Vice President of R&D for the Application Modernization Business Unit) and Joe Beda (now VMware's Principal Engineer).
In their view, the presence of k8s will become more and more "weak" because k8s are becoming irreplaceable:
"K8s has been through seven years, but we think it's still in its infancy as a community... We want to make k8s 'boring' and make it reliable enough to embed in the ecosystem.
In this way, it really becomes an integral part of the work, as we describe the infrastructure in abstractions, as if it disappeared into the framework, without the need to think extra about its existence."
Seven year itch? K8s said the road is still far away!