State of Kubernetes 2023 Report – The most interesting findings

Once again, VMWare has published a "State of Kubernetes" report for 2023 with very interesting findings. The key findings of the report are:

• Indirect efficiency benefits from Kubernetes predominate, but direct business benefits are also seen.
• Multi-cloud is on its way to becoming the standard, but also brings its challenges.
• Top challenges when using Kubernetes are lack of experience, security and standardization.

Benefits of using Kubernetes.

The survey of 752 software developers and IT professionals found that the biggest benefits from using Kubernetes are increased efficiency for administrators (64%) and increased productivity for developers (60%). These benefits are not, however, easy to put a monetary value on. It is therefore interesting to note that 25% of respondents put the use of Kubernetes in a direct correlation with a growing market share. In addition, about 1/5 stated that new revenue-generating customer experiences/features were developed through Kubernetes and that profit margins increased.

Other benefits from Kubernetes also include improved resource utilization, shortened development cycles, and enabling migration to the cloud.

Multi-cloud on the rise

The last point brings us straight to the next big part of the report, the growing importance of multi-cloud strategies. This year, for the first time, participants were asked directly about the reasons for using multiple cloud providers, and the results were not very surprising. The top reason is to reduce vendor dependency, followed by cost management.

That the importance of multi-cloud is increasing can be seen in the disproportionate increase in the use of Kubernetes with multiple public cloud providers.

Challenges in deploying Kubernetes.

Of course, there are challenges in deploying Kubernetes. Leading these is inadequate experience in the enterprise. Second is meeting security and compliance requirements. Also interesting is the very large increase in unclear responsibilities (doubled).

The top security concerns when using Kubernetes are misconfigurations, consistent application of policies across clusters and teams, and unpatched CVEs in Kubernetes distributions.

You can download the report here: VMWare website