The State of Kubernetes 2023: Cloud Cost Remediation Is Top Priority

Pepperdata has released The State of Kubernetes 2023, the results of a survey conducted with 800 C-level execs and senior ITOps and DevOps professionals in industries including financial services, healthcare, technology, and advertising. The survey aimed to gain insights into the types and sizes of containerized applications and other workloads on Kubernetes clusters, as well as the FinOps tools and practices used to optimize Kubernetes deployments and control costs.


Key findings from the survey show:

1. The Kubernetes market is maturing.

Evidence of this includes:

■ The number of clusters that are being deployed has grown to six to ten clusters per organization.

■ The variety and types of workloads that are now being launched by Kubernetes extend beyond microservices to data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics, databases, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

■ An emerging challenge has been unexpected infrastructure spend and the growing focus on cost control and optimization.

2. Companies deploying Kubernetes clusters are doing so to stay competitive or ahead of the competition, and need the agility Kubernetes affords them to deploy services rapidly.

3. Cost savings was identified as the top ROI metric for a Kubernetes deployment.

4. Companies are turning to a wide variety of approaches to attempt to remediate infrastructure spend overruns.

"The survey confirms that Kubernetes has become the preferred choice for deploying workloads among agile enterprises. However, the speed and ease of deployment can result in unexpected infrastructure cost overruns. Respondents are increasingly turning to FinOps and cloud cost optimization tools to help them remediate the cost of operating in the cloud and optimize their Kubernetes clusters," said Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. "Regardless, the survey shows that cost savings is the top metric people are using to measure the ROI of their Kubernetes investments in 2023."

Other findings included:

■ How many? The average number of Kubernetes clusters among those surveyed ranged from three to ten. 32% reported having three to five deployments, while 38% reported six to ten clusters. Almost 15% said they had between 11 and 25 clusters, and four% reported more than 25.

■ What for? When asked what types of applications were being deployed, respondents chose from a list of workloads, with the most popular being data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics, including Apache Spark as the choice for 61% of those polled. Other popular deployments included databases or NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis; and web servers like NGINX.

■ What challenges? The benefits of Kubernetes are many, but companies also find that getting a Kubernetes project off the ground comes with many challenges. These include significant or unexpected spend on compute, storage, networking infrastructure, and/or cloud-based IaaS; a steep learning curve; and a lack of visibility into Kubernetes spend, leading to cost overruns. Over 57% cited the "significant or unexpected spend on compute, storage, networking infrastructure, and/or cloud-based IaaS" as their biggest challenge.

■ Big upsides. There are many ways to measure the return on Kubernetes investments. Those polled found that cost savings was the primary metric they used to measure success. Almost 44% of the organizations are implementing cloud cost reduction and FinOps initiatives to reduce cost overruns.

The Rise of FinOps for Kubernetes Workloads

FinOps is a budding approach to managing and optimizing cloud spending across different teams within an organization. Given the increased interest in managing Kubernetes costs in the cloud, those surveyed were asked about their experience with FinOps.

The FinOps Foundation defines levels of familiarity with FinOps, from crawl to walk to run. Similar to the results identified in The State of FinOps 2022 survey, most respondents self-identified at the walk stage, meaning they can implement cloud cost reduction recommendations. The second largest group self-identified as the crawl stage, with the ability to visualize cloud costs even if they haven't yet begun the process of implementing recommendations for remediation. Interestingly, more than 98% of respondents indicated familiarity with FinOps and saw themselves somewhere on the continuum of implementing best practices for cloud cost remediation. In addition, more than 17% of respondents identified themselves in the run stage, with the ability to remediate cloud costs autonomously.

Hot Topics

The Latest

6 Signals That an Architectural Shift Is Underway Across Enterprise Networks

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Cisco

Is Better Release Management the Solution to the Persistent Banking App Downtime?

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Understanding Zero-Day Vulnerabilities: Why They Matter and How to Stay Protected

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

Data Center Outages Becoming Less Frequent

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

Instrumentation Score: Quantifying Telemetry Quality

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

Automating While Keeping Humans in the Loop

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

AI Factories: Scaling Intelligence with Observability, Reliability and Efficiency

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Think You've Heard Everything About the Debate over RTO? Here's the Big Thing Leaders Are Missing

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

Beyond the MACH Hype: Why Your Commerce Platform Is Not Helping You Win DX or CX

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

Effective FinOps: Moving from Recommendations to Risks

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

The State of Kubernetes 2023: Cloud Cost Remediation Is Top Priority

Pepperdata has released The State of Kubernetes 2023, the results of a survey conducted with 800 C-level execs and senior ITOps and DevOps professionals in industries including financial services, healthcare, technology, and advertising. The survey aimed to gain insights into the types and sizes of containerized applications and other workloads on Kubernetes clusters, as well as the FinOps tools and practices used to optimize Kubernetes deployments and control costs.


Key findings from the survey show:

1. The Kubernetes market is maturing.

Evidence of this includes:

■ The number of clusters that are being deployed has grown to six to ten clusters per organization.

■ The variety and types of workloads that are now being launched by Kubernetes extend beyond microservices to data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics, databases, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

■ An emerging challenge has been unexpected infrastructure spend and the growing focus on cost control and optimization.

2. Companies deploying Kubernetes clusters are doing so to stay competitive or ahead of the competition, and need the agility Kubernetes affords them to deploy services rapidly.

3. Cost savings was identified as the top ROI metric for a Kubernetes deployment.

4. Companies are turning to a wide variety of approaches to attempt to remediate infrastructure spend overruns.

"The survey confirms that Kubernetes has become the preferred choice for deploying workloads among agile enterprises. However, the speed and ease of deployment can result in unexpected infrastructure cost overruns. Respondents are increasingly turning to FinOps and cloud cost optimization tools to help them remediate the cost of operating in the cloud and optimize their Kubernetes clusters," said Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. "Regardless, the survey shows that cost savings is the top metric people are using to measure the ROI of their Kubernetes investments in 2023."

Other findings included:

■ How many? The average number of Kubernetes clusters among those surveyed ranged from three to ten. 32% reported having three to five deployments, while 38% reported six to ten clusters. Almost 15% said they had between 11 and 25 clusters, and four% reported more than 25.

■ What for? When asked what types of applications were being deployed, respondents chose from a list of workloads, with the most popular being data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics, including Apache Spark as the choice for 61% of those polled. Other popular deployments included databases or NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis; and web servers like NGINX.

■ What challenges? The benefits of Kubernetes are many, but companies also find that getting a Kubernetes project off the ground comes with many challenges. These include significant or unexpected spend on compute, storage, networking infrastructure, and/or cloud-based IaaS; a steep learning curve; and a lack of visibility into Kubernetes spend, leading to cost overruns. Over 57% cited the "significant or unexpected spend on compute, storage, networking infrastructure, and/or cloud-based IaaS" as their biggest challenge.

■ Big upsides. There are many ways to measure the return on Kubernetes investments. Those polled found that cost savings was the primary metric they used to measure success. Almost 44% of the organizations are implementing cloud cost reduction and FinOps initiatives to reduce cost overruns.

The Rise of FinOps for Kubernetes Workloads

FinOps is a budding approach to managing and optimizing cloud spending across different teams within an organization. Given the increased interest in managing Kubernetes costs in the cloud, those surveyed were asked about their experience with FinOps.

The FinOps Foundation defines levels of familiarity with FinOps, from crawl to walk to run. Similar to the results identified in The State of FinOps 2022 survey, most respondents self-identified at the walk stage, meaning they can implement cloud cost reduction recommendations. The second largest group self-identified as the crawl stage, with the ability to visualize cloud costs even if they haven't yet begun the process of implementing recommendations for remediation. Interestingly, more than 98% of respondents indicated familiarity with FinOps and saw themselves somewhere on the continuum of implementing best practices for cloud cost remediation. In addition, more than 17% of respondents identified themselves in the run stage, with the ability to remediate cloud costs autonomously.

Hot Topics

The Latest

6 Signals That an Architectural Shift Is Underway Across Enterprise Networks

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Cisco

Is Better Release Management the Solution to the Persistent Banking App Downtime?

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Understanding Zero-Day Vulnerabilities: Why They Matter and How to Stay Protected

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

Data Center Outages Becoming Less Frequent

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

Instrumentation Score: Quantifying Telemetry Quality

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

Automating While Keeping Humans in the Loop

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

AI Factories: Scaling Intelligence with Observability, Reliability and Efficiency

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Think You've Heard Everything About the Debate over RTO? Here's the Big Thing Leaders Are Missing

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

Beyond the MACH Hype: Why Your Commerce Platform Is Not Helping You Win DX or CX

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

Effective FinOps: Moving from Recommendations to Risks

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...