30 Sep 4 Kubernetes Container Trends DevOps Teams Need to Know for Q4 2021
Kirby Wadsworth
Kirby has more than two decades of marketing leadership in both publicly traded large enterprises and emerging startups. As a founder and early venture executive with several successful exits, Kirby helped pioneer the cloud storage, continuous data protection, and file virtualization industries.
With a CAGR of 63%, the container infrastructure software market is rapidly growing. Consequently, traditional hardware vendors and cloud providers are racing to support containers and data services. Because of this, there is heavy competition amongst cloud-native data management start-ups, traditional data storage and data management vendors. However, most companies lack the ability to offer native data services and containerized Kubernetes storage platforms.
Only a few organizations are currently offering products that natively handle Kubernetes environments and the scaling challenges that come along with them. Thus, it’s best to keep up with container trends so that you can better vet potential technologies and their solutions. In this article, we’re placing a spotlight on the top 4 Kubernetes container trends all DevOps professionals need to know.
1. Acceleration of the Shift to the Cloud
The primary driver for organizations adopting containers is to accelerate software delivery and increase flexibility while moving to the cloud. The shift to the cloud is nothing new. In fact, 94% of enterprises already use a cloud service whether it be hybrid, multi, public, or private. Yet, especially with the increase of remote work, the shift to the cloud accelerated in 2020 and in 2021. It’s likely to continue on this upward trajectory as well. In fact, Gartner predicts that more than $1.3 trillion in IT spending will be allocated to the shift to the cloud by 2022.
As the shift to the cloud accelerates, it’s expected that hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will progressively offer new tools to streamline the journey to a container-native environment.
2. Increased Need for Scalability
Traditional data management approaches are difficult to scale and often do not offer the granularity necessary to manage data effectively. On the flip side, containers allow applications to be split into smaller components. Each of these components are able to run in its own container. Thus, these types of containers allow developers to increase the number of storage volumes to be managed, enabling increased scalability and extensibility.
To stay ahead of the competition, organizations are trying to access the benefits of containerization and achieve increased scalability. Gartner predicts that by 2023, 70% of organizations will be running more than two containerized applications. Containerized applications built on Kubernetes enable easier configuration, faster deployment, and increase efficiency and scalability. By utilizing containers built on Kubernetes, technology prioritizing a cloud-native approach enables enterprises to scale exponentially with near-infinite capacity and performance.
For more information on exactly how ionir increases extensibility and scalability, check out the data sheet, Hybrid Cloud Database Scaling.
3. Security Emerging as a Top Container Priority
Security is always a major concern for DevOps professionals, especially when it comes to adopting new technologies. According to a recent RedHat survey, 59% of DevOps professionals are worried about security and compliance needs and potential threats to containers. This is because not knowing where your data lives may potentially leave it open to corruption, theft, or some other type of unauthorized access. As a matter of fact, 55% of the same survey’s respondents were forced to delay an application rollout specifically because of security concerns.
A recent survey reports that enterprises are now mixing how they are addressing container security. For example, when asked which roles are responsible for maintaining container security, survey respondents split their answers among security (42%), development (30%), and operations (28%). This is an interesting finding considering nearly 75% of organizations have a DevSecOps initiative in place with approximately 49% of organizations still in the very early stages of implementation.
4. The Data Discovery Market is Exponentially Growing
It’s no secret — data discovery is a major pain point for DevOps engineers and has been for years. In fact, traditional methods such as AI-enabled searches are necessary for research, analysis, and decision making.
Developers can search for data based on:
- Department
- Enterprise
- Task-based
- Discovery systems
- Cloud-based
- Personal information
However, finding data with these traditional methods is still cumbersome and time-consuming. Due to the growing importance of data-decision making, the data discovery market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21% by 2026. Thus, there is a need for new technologies to support updated data discovery methods such as accessing data by name.
Data addressing by name allows the definition of data to move between systems without affecting the application’s ability to access it. This way, it doesn’t matter where the blocks are located, all can be accessed regardless. Whereas data addressing by location is time-consuming and riddles the pipeline with delays, data addressing by name reduces data gaps and wasted wait time between the stages of the deployment pipeline.
Final Thoughts
For organizations that haven’t already modernized their architecture by utilizing containers, the time to do so is now. As more organizations are realizing the benefits of containers — increased agility, scalability, data delivery — they’re adopting the right technology to help them manage and secure their data. ionir can help.
Transform your IT architecture today with the ionir Data Services for Kubernetes Platform — start your free trial today.
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