Since 2018, our annual State of Kubernetes survey has consistently found that organizations achieve significant operational benefits from using Kubernetes, especially “improved resource utilization.” This year, we wanted to understand how Kubernetes impacts the business as a whole.
The results are unequivocal. Nine out of ten stakeholders surveyed for this year’s State of Kubernetes 2023 report agree that “Kubernetes has benefited our entire organization, not just IT.” When teams embrace Kubernetes to drive down costs and accelerate the pace of development, Kubernetes delivers and the entire business benefits.
These benefits in turn appear to have a measurable ripple effect that has (or can have) a direct impact on the bottom line. Direct business benefits include: “new revenue-driving customer experiences have been created” (21%), “the business is seeing growth in market share” (25%), and “profit margins are increasing” (20%). It’s clear that Kubernetes is delivering a significant return on investment (ROI) for many organizations.
While the percentage of stakeholders reporting these direct benefits appears modest versus the indirect business benefits mentioned earlier, many of the stakeholders surveyed are in frontline positions that typically lack visibility of Kubernetes impact on profits and market share, so this is somewhat to be expected. We’ll keep a close eye on these direct business benefits in coming years.
How can your organization reap Kubernetes and cloud native benefits?
If you’re a business leader at a company doing software development—and what company isn’t nowadays?—you naturally want to ensure that you’re doing everything possible to maximize the operational and business benefits of your cloud native efforts.
This year’s State of Kubernetes report provides some important insights regarding how to achieve this. Kubernetes operations are increasingly multi-cloud, which is defined in the survey as multiple public cloud vendors or a mix of public and private cloud. More than three-quarters of those surveyed (76%) utilize multiple clouds, and multi-cloud operations are even more prevalent in industries such as telecom (89%) and financial services and insurance (87%).
Significant shifts are underway as organizations seek to develop the capabilities necessary to deploy and operate any application in any cloud. Organizations are changing their priorities when it comes to selecting Kubernetes distributions. The primary Kubernetes selection criteria are (in order):
- Easy to deploy, operate, and maintain
- Works in a hybrid cloud environment
- Availability of commercial support or professional services
- Vendor maturity
- Leverage any Kubernetes or cloud without lock-in
Choosing Kubernetes distributions and other tools wisely is essential for simplifying multi-cloud operations and ensuring success as your digital operations scale. Stakeholders are also increasingly willing to pay for support for critical tools, especially security and monitoring tools.
How can VMware Tanzu help?
VMware Tanzu offers a suite of tools and services to help you accelerate your cloud native journey. VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations provides the foundation for building a modern container infrastructure at scale. It includes
- A consistent Kubernetes runtime across on-premises, public clouds, and edge environments
- A centralized multi-cloud, multicluster management hub
- Full-stack, multi-cloud observability
- End-to-end connectivity with zero-trust security, data encryption, and more
With VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, your organization can run the same Kubernetes environment everywhere, streamlining operations and reducing or eliminating the errors that occur when teams operate across multiple, disparate environments with different tool sets.
If your platform engineering team is struggling to keep up with Kubernetes lifecycle management and other tasks, spending too much time trying to pull together toolsets, or worried that its security practices aren’t keeping up with increasing threats, Tanzu can help.
Learn more
Read the full State of Kubernetes 2023 report for more insights on how your peers maximize Kubernetes success.
The VMware Tanzu team hosted a webinar that dives deeper into the details of the report, answers questions, and discusses Kubernetes solutions.
