The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today released the results from its annual user survey indicating growing ubiquity of the use of cloud native technologies.

The survey found that a number of CNCF-hosted projects reached more than 50% use in production by those surveued. This includes more than half of CNCF’s graduated projects: Kubernetes (78%), Prometheus (72%), CoreDNS (69%), Fluentd (64%), and contianerd (53%).

The CNCF conducts the annual community survey, which is now in its seventh iteration, to check its vital signs and better understand where and how cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes, serverless, and service mesh are being adopted. 

Container usage continues to explode as organizations are eager to leave their legacy systems in the dust for the promise of greater efficiencies and insights that cloud deployments have to offer. The survey found that use of containers in production has increased significantly with 84% of respondents using containers in production – a jump of more than 15% from 2018. Another 14% have plans to use containers in production.

Public cloud continues to be the most popular data center approach, though it did see a decrease from 77% using this model in the 2018 survey, to 62% using this model in the 2019 survey. Hybrid cloud was a new response and was selected by 38% of respondents. CNCF said it “fully expects this trend to continue” as enterprises seek more control and aim to avoid vendor lock-in.

The survey found that Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) was the dominant container management platform, with close 30% of respondents running deployments on the managed platform. EKS was closely followed by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with about 27%, and Docker Desktop with about 23%. 

The use of the Kubernetes container orchestration platform also continues to grow unabated. Survey results showed Kubernetes use in production has grown dramatically with 78% of respondents using the platform in production. This is a huge jump from the 58% reported last year. 

Most Kubernetes users are running between two and five clusters in production. This range was also the largest category selected last year. The results also indicated that users are increasing the number of clusters they are using in production. CNCF attributes the increase of clusters in production to organizations “having more trust in containers,” and running them more in user-facing applications. 

However, the report also found stagnation in the use of larger cluster deployments. The use of between 21 and 50 clusters in production has hovered at about 4% for the last two years, with an actual decline seen in the use of more than 50 clusters in production environments.  

According to the survey, service mesh use in production is still rather low with 18% of those who responded indicating they use a service mesh product. However, there is interest in the technology as 47% of respondents are evaluating the use of a service mesh.

For those evaluating or using service mesh products, Istio (69%) was the most popular tool. Istio has seen rapid adoption, but is not part of the official CNCF project landscape.

The Linkerd service mesh, on the other hand, is housed by the foundation and is viewed as a more mature alternative to Istio. Despite the perceived maturity, Linkerd (64%) usage still came in behind Istio.

If containers are viewed as a more streamlined version of virtual machines (VMs), then serverless computing is seen as a trimmer iteration of containers. It is for this reason that serverless computing has garnered significant buzz over the past three years. 

The CNCF survey found that 41% of respondents are using serverless technologies and another 20% are planning to in the next 12 to 18 months.

Of those who are using serverless, 80% use a hosted platform vs. 20% who use installable software. Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Lambda was selected by 53% of respondents as the preferred tool on hosted platforms. Lambda took this category by a landslide over Google Cloud Functions at a distant second with 18% and Microsoft Azure Functions with 14%.

For the 20% of respondents using installable serverless platforms, 34% picked Google’s Knative product as their tool of choice, followed by OpenFaaS with 15% and Kubeless with 11%.