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.

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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.

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Beyond Traditional Autoscaling: The Future of Kubernetes in AI Infrastructure

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI Drives Surge in Data Budgets

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A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

Will AI Solve the Growing Data Divide?

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

Top Concerns for Tech Decision Makers

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

Gartner: Top Trends Shaping the Future of Cloud

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2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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