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Complexity and Scale of Kubernetes Highlight Need for Observability and Optimization

Kubernetes is rapidly becoming the standard for cloud and on-premises clusters, according to the 2021 Kubernetes & Big Data Report from Pepperdata based on a survey of 800 IT professionals.


However, Kubernetes is a complex technology, and companies are struggling to properly and effectively implement and manage these environments. The complexity of big data applications makes resource optimization a real challenge. Unsurprisingly, when IT doesn't have granular visibility into big data Kubernetes performance, optimized performance and spend are hard to achieve.

"Kubernetes is increasingly being adopted by our customers for big data applications. As a result, we see customers experiencing performance challenges," said Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. "This survey clearly indicates that these problems are universal and there is a need to better optimize these big data workloads."

The report states:"Kubernetes is extremely complicated. Manual monitoring cannot keep up, and proprietary solutions are unlikely to be up to the task. It’s always tempting, faced with a new tool like Kubernetes, to use a homegrown solution that already exists. But with Kubernetes, more custom solutions are required. General-purpose APM won’t cut it; companies need tools purpose built for big data workloads on Kubernetes."

The survey reveals a number of insights into how businesses are adopting Kubernetes for big data applications:

■ When asked what their goals were for adopting Kubernetes for big data workloads, 30% said to "improve resource utilization for reduced cloud costs." 23% want to enable their migration to the cloud; 18% said to shorten deployment cycles; 15% wanted to make their platforms and applications cloud-agnostic; and 14% said to containerize monolithic apps.

■ Porting hundreds or thousands of apps over to Kubernetes can be challenging, and the biggest hurdles for survey respondents included initial deployment, followed by migration, monitoring and alerting, complexity and increased cost, and reliability, in that order.

■ The kinds of applications and workloads respondents are running, in order of most to least, include Spark, 30%; Kafka, 25%; Presto 23%; AI/deep learning workloads using PyTorch or Tensorflow at 18%; and "other" at 5%.

■ Surprisingly, and despite how much the media writes about the move to public cloud, this survey found that 47% of respondents are using Kubernetes in private cloud environments. On-premises use made up 35%, and just 18% of respondents said they were using Kubernetes containers in public cloud environments.

■ 45% of Kubernetes workloads are in development and testing environments, as users move production workloads into a new resource management framework. 30% are doing proof-of-concept work.

■ 66% of respondents said 75–100% of their big data workloads will be on Kubernetes by the end of 2021.

■ IT operations was the clear leader — at 80% — in deploying Spark and other big data apps built on Kubernetes; Engineering followed with 11%; with business unit developers at just 9%.

Methodology: The survey was conducted in March 2021, among 800 participants from a range of industries, 72% of which worked at companies with between 500 and 5000 employees. 

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Complexity and Scale of Kubernetes Highlight Need for Observability and Optimization

Kubernetes is rapidly becoming the standard for cloud and on-premises clusters, according to the 2021 Kubernetes & Big Data Report from Pepperdata based on a survey of 800 IT professionals.


However, Kubernetes is a complex technology, and companies are struggling to properly and effectively implement and manage these environments. The complexity of big data applications makes resource optimization a real challenge. Unsurprisingly, when IT doesn't have granular visibility into big data Kubernetes performance, optimized performance and spend are hard to achieve.

"Kubernetes is increasingly being adopted by our customers for big data applications. As a result, we see customers experiencing performance challenges," said Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. "This survey clearly indicates that these problems are universal and there is a need to better optimize these big data workloads."

The report states:"Kubernetes is extremely complicated. Manual monitoring cannot keep up, and proprietary solutions are unlikely to be up to the task. It’s always tempting, faced with a new tool like Kubernetes, to use a homegrown solution that already exists. But with Kubernetes, more custom solutions are required. General-purpose APM won’t cut it; companies need tools purpose built for big data workloads on Kubernetes."

The survey reveals a number of insights into how businesses are adopting Kubernetes for big data applications:

■ When asked what their goals were for adopting Kubernetes for big data workloads, 30% said to "improve resource utilization for reduced cloud costs." 23% want to enable their migration to the cloud; 18% said to shorten deployment cycles; 15% wanted to make their platforms and applications cloud-agnostic; and 14% said to containerize monolithic apps.

■ Porting hundreds or thousands of apps over to Kubernetes can be challenging, and the biggest hurdles for survey respondents included initial deployment, followed by migration, monitoring and alerting, complexity and increased cost, and reliability, in that order.

■ The kinds of applications and workloads respondents are running, in order of most to least, include Spark, 30%; Kafka, 25%; Presto 23%; AI/deep learning workloads using PyTorch or Tensorflow at 18%; and "other" at 5%.

■ Surprisingly, and despite how much the media writes about the move to public cloud, this survey found that 47% of respondents are using Kubernetes in private cloud environments. On-premises use made up 35%, and just 18% of respondents said they were using Kubernetes containers in public cloud environments.

■ 45% of Kubernetes workloads are in development and testing environments, as users move production workloads into a new resource management framework. 30% are doing proof-of-concept work.

■ 66% of respondents said 75–100% of their big data workloads will be on Kubernetes by the end of 2021.

■ IT operations was the clear leader — at 80% — in deploying Spark and other big data apps built on Kubernetes; Engineering followed with 11%; with business unit developers at just 9%.

Methodology: The survey was conducted in March 2021, among 800 participants from a range of industries, 72% of which worked at companies with between 500 and 5000 employees. 

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...