Adoption of cloud-native architectures on the rise

Research from SlashData for the Cloud Native Computing Forum (CNCF) has found that the global number of cloud-native developers has grown by one million in the past 12 months to reach 7.1 million.

Open source container orchestration technology Kubernetes has been a CNCF project since 2016. It has quickly become the de facto standard for managing cloud-native environments.

The study reported that 30% of developers have used Kubernetes in the past 12 months, which puts the number of back-end developers using the container technology at approximately 5.1 million.

CNCF is also expanding its membership among non-IT businesses, with aerospace manufacturer Boeing the latest company to become a platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Forum. New end-user members include French rail operator SNCF, online furniture store Wayfair and car manufacturer Volvo.

CNCF has seen an increase in the adoption of Kubernetes and growing interest in deploying service mesh technology for networking microservices in a reliable and secure manner. Growth in cloud-native architectures has been driven by digitisation initiatives.

During the pandemic, Kubernetes provided the scaffolding for companies to become cloud-native, according to Priyanka Sharma, general manager of CNCF. Speaking at the KubeCon Europe 2022 conference in Valencia, she said: “I see cloud native becoming more relevant in the manufacture of cars, trains and aeroplanes.”

Boeing is one of the organisations investing in accelerating cloud-native computing to support its digitisation initiatives. “At Boeing, we are working to leverage the flexibility and massive scalability of public cloud deployments to build extremely robust aerospace products and deliver software solutions with rapid iteration and innovation to our customers,” said Jinnah Hosein, Boeing’s vice-president of software engineering.

“Boeing is pleased to join CNCF and be part of the ecosystem. I am looking forward to this partnership and together we’ll change the world with extremely robust software deployments,” added Hosein.

Boeing is also looking for opportunities to foster and contribute to open source projects, as well as create new ones, built on top of open source technologies. It recently opened its first Open Source Program Office (OSPO).

In terms of the adoption of service mesh technology, a recent CNCF survey reported that 70% of the 253 developers polled were running a service mesh in production or development, and 19% in evaluation mode. Some said they were running a service mesh for clients who had high levels of adoption. Fewer than 10% said they are not running service mesh technology.

According to CNCF, service mesh adoption is running hand-in-hand with the roll-out of Kubernetes clusters. The majority of participants (65%) run or plan to run between two and 10 Kubernetes clusters on a service mesh. Another 11% are operating or planning to operate between 11 and 25, with just 10% going further with 26 or more clusters.