cloudnativenow.com
Pain Points Persist as Reliance on Kubernetes Rises
Excerpt
Conducted by Traefik Labs, a provider of application networking software for microservices, the survey also finds 60% of respondents are running two or more Kubernetes clusters. ... A total of 44% of respondents also note cost management causes friction as they scale and expand their Kubernetes clusters. Other issues include securing applications and integrating third-party tracing systems tied at 33% each. Not surprisingly, the top pain point cited by respondents (43%) is setup and configuration, followed by maintenance and having too many platforms at 28% each. Half of respondents (50%) also said they still log in directly into their clusters to review logs manually when issues arise. The most widely employed management tools are Grafana and Prometheus at 74% and 68%, respectively. Finally, 60% of respondents note they are also employing multiple ingress controllers.
Related Pain Points
Complex surrounding infrastructure requiring deep expertise
8The real challenge in Kubernetes deployment goes beyond cluster setup to configuring RBAC, secrets management, and infrastructure-as-code. Teams without prior experience make decisions that require painful redesigns later, as shown by organizations requiring 50% of their year dedicated to cluster maintenance.
Application security and third-party integration challenges
733% of respondents cite securing applications and integrating third-party tracing systems as pain points. Security has emerged as the #1 concern for DoK workloads, driven by complexity of securing distributed data workloads and regulatory compliance.
Operational toil and fragmented incident response workflows
7Manual deployments, inconsistent workflows, and fragmented observability across tools increase on-call load and MTTR. Engineers jump between tools during incidents instead of fixing issues, driving burnout and slower delivery due to constant firefighting.
Massive cluster resource overprovisioning and wasted spending
699.94% of Kubernetes clusters are over-provisioned with CPU utilization at ~10% and memory at ~23%, meaning nearly three-quarters of allocated cloud spend sits idle. More than 65% of workloads run under half their requested resources, and 82% are overprovisioned.
Multiple ingress controller management and networking complexity
560% of respondents employ multiple ingress controllers, adding operational complexity and potential inconsistency in application networking configuration and management across clusters.