More companies are looking for Kubernetes talent now that it is being used on a large scale.
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Kubernetes enthusiasts came into effect for KubeCon 2019, which was held in San Diego just before Thanksgiving. More than 12,000 people attended the event and Platform9 interviewed nearly 1,500 people about how they use Kubernetes.
Kamesh Pemmaraju, head of product marketing for a Platform9, explained the findings of the survey in a blog post and emphasized the wide acceptance of Kubernetes, an open-source container operating system. More than 400 people reported that their company was planning to run at least 50 clusters in production over the next six months.
Pemmaraju added that the number of clusters and nodes used increased, with some respondents telling Platform9 that their company had hundreds of nodes in just one or two clusters. The survey also emphasized the fact that many companies use Kubernetes on both on-premises and public cloud infrastructure.
Due to the enormous expansion of the use cases of Kubernetes, more companies than ever are looking for talent in the field. Many companies, such as Capital One and Walmart, used the conference to advertise their goals and meet experts. The report noted that the number of Kubernetes jobs on Indeed.com rose to 12,500, with more than 3,000 jobs added in the last six months.
SEE: Special report: from cloud to edge: the next IT transformation (free PDF) (TechRepublic Premium)
“It is amazing to see the huge scale of Kubernetes implementations. The companies at KubeCon who lead these large-scale Kubernetes implementations position themselves to quickly deliver superior customer experiences that give them a clear competitive advantage in a rapidly changing digital economy,” Pemmaraju wrote.
“They not only use it in their core data centers and the public cloud, but they also use a huge number of Edge Computing use cases from vertical industries ranging from retail and production to automotive and 5G implementations,” he added.
A growing number of companies are using Kubernetes for edge computing, with 145 respondents reporting having an edge implementation with Kubernetes and another 38% managing Kubernetes at more than 100 locations. Almost half of those who use Kubernetes for edge computing said they had at least 11 servers at each location.
According to Pemmaraju, the most common applications implemented on the edge were edge ports / access control, monitoring and video analysis, 5G and point-of-sales or store tools.
“It is quite a challenge to scale tens or hundreds of pseudo-data centers that need to be managed with little or no touch, usually without staff and little access,” said Pemmaraju.
“These scenarios include peripheral sites owned by the company (eg, Stores), and in the case of on-premises software companies, the data centers of their end customers. Given the large scale, traditional data center management processes do not apply,” he added.
The increase in acceptance came with some drawbacks, because many survey respondents reported having problems with security and upgrades.
“Running on a large scale presents unique challenges. It is fairly easy to use one or two Kubernetes clusters for proof of concepts or development / testing. Reliable management at scale in production is something completely different, especially if you dozens of clusters and hundreds of nodes, “wrote Pemmaraju.
“The complexity and abstraction of Kubernetes is necessary and it is there for good reasons, but it also makes it difficult to solve problems if things don’t work as expected. No wonder that 48.86% of the respondents indicate that monitoring on a scale their biggest challenge, followed by upgrades (44.3%) and security patching (34.09%), “he added.
The report says that DevOps, PlatformOps and ITOps teams should turn to tools such as Prometheus, fluent, Istio to address logging, metrics, perceptibility and service mesh issues. But the field is constantly evolving, so it is up to the teams to stay informed of all updates or changes.
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