A look back at the cloud-native community in 2021

As a proud CNCF member, the past 12 months have been eventful for NexClipper, and with the Cloud-Native Computing Federation publishing its annual report just in time for the new year, this marks the perfect opportunity to take a moment and look back at what 2021 brought for the cloud-native community. Read on to find out more.

Kubernetes has arrived in production

According to CNCF’s report, cloud-native technology adoption has increased rapidly during the global pandemic and, overall, we could observe last year cementing Kubernetes as container orchestration tool, supported by a steady contributor community. RedHat conducted a survey for its “Kubernetes adoption, security, and market trends report 2021”, revealing that Kubernetes is used by nearly everyone with an adoption rate of 88 %, especially in production environments (74 %). Over 500 engineering, security, and DevOps professionals where among the survey respondents. 47 % of them were running their containers in a hybrid setting – another interesting find when it comes to the state of cloud-native adoption last year.

Source: RedHat

End-users are taking over

In 2021, the CNCF community grew by 12 %, with now over 740 companies participating in the organization. This includes the world’s largest private and public cloud corporations, innovative software players, end-user organizations – and of course NexClipper.

Cloud-native end-users increased at an even higher rate than overall members, by a total of 17 %. This year Spotify was awarded CNCF’s Top End User Award for its notable contributions to the cloud-native ecosystem. Community case studies further showcased how diverse end user companies are: from healthcare and finance to retail and data storage industries.

Source: CNCF

Focus on security & observability

According to the annual report, the community overall continued its focus on app delivery, ease of creating Kubernetes applications, and growing the range of increasingly mature storage projects. Furthermore, 2021 has been a year to highlight the importance of security within the entire cloud-native supply chain and RedHat’s survey revealed security as a top concern when it comes to container strategies among respondents.

An important aspect to ensure system security is observability for cloud-native and hybrid architectures, finetuned to the needs of these specific environments. At NexClipper, we are excited to be at the forefront of delivering an observability solution that supports the user-friendly management of such architectures and to contribute our knowhow in this field to the ever-supportive cloud-native community. We are already looking forward to participating at the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 events in Europe and North America this year and to continuing driving the adoption of cloud-native technology and observability together with our peers. Here’s to a happy and smooth sailing in 2022!

If you would like to discuss this topic further or are interested in NexClipper, please connect with us via support@nexclipper.io.