72% of respondents in China use Kubernetes in their production

At CNCF, we regularly survey the community to better understand the use of open source and cloud-native technologies. This is the third China Cloud Native Survey, conducted in Chinese, to gain a deeper understanding of the pace of adoption of cloud native technologies in China and how to empower developers and make changes in the large and growing community. This report is based on the previous two China reports released in March 2018 and November 2018.

The focus of China’s cloud primary survey

  • Forty-nine percent of respondents use containers in production, and another 32 percent plan to do so. This is a significant increase from November 2018, when only 20 percent of production used containers.
  • 72% of respondents use Kubernetes in production, up from 40% in November 2018.
  • Public cloud usage dropped to 36 percent from 51 percent in November 2018, replaced by a new hybrid option of 39 percent.
  • CNCF projects are growing exponentially. CNCF has four projects that were born in China and are more widely used in the region: Dragonfly and KubeEdge in the incubation phase, and Harbor and TIKV, which are just out of school.

The 2019 China Cloud Native Survey included 300 respondents — 97% of whom were from Asia, mainly China.

containers

We know that containers have changed our cloud-based infrastructure, but over the past year, container use in production has become the norm. According to our 2019 Global Cloud Native Survey released earlier this year, 84% of respondents use containers in their production, making containers ubiquitous worldwide.

The China survey suggests that while container use in China lags behind the world, it is gaining momentum. In the China survey, nearly half (49%) of respondents used containers in their production — a jump from 32% in the March 2018 survey and 20% in November 2018.

Fewer and fewer Chinese members plan to use containers in their production — 32% now, compared to 57% in the March 2018 survey and 40% in November. This means that many organizations have put container initiatives in place and are no longer planning, but still have room for growth and want to continue to grow.



Your organization uses containers for…

Proof of concept

Development and Development

The Test Test

Production Production

As production applications increase, there are fewer containers in the test environment. About 28 percent of survey respondents in China currently use containers in their tests — a slight increase from 24 percent in March 2018, but a decrease from 42 percent in the November 2018 survey.

While containers offer amazing advantages, they also pose challenges. It has changed over time, but the challenge of complexity has stayed the same. In the China survey, 53 per cent of respondents listed complexity as the biggest challenge. This compares to the March 2018 survey in which 44% of respondents cited complexity as the biggest challenge, the highest percentage. In November 2018, 28 percent of respondents took part in the survey, the third highest percentage.

In terms of challenges, safety came in second, with 39 percent of respondents. For the first time, security was listed as a top challenge. Inadequate training and networking tied for third place at 36 percent, while 35 percent of survey respondents cited reliability and monitoring as deployment challenges.



Container Challenges

Complexity complexity

Security safety

Lack of training

Networking network

Reliability reliability

Monitoring monitoring

Service Mash is a network service

Cultural Changes W/Development Team

Scaling deployments based upon the load

Difficulty in choosing an orchestration solution

Kubernetes growth

Kubernetes is emerging in the industry as a general purpose container orchestration platform and has seen a sharp increase in adoption among the CNCF community in China. 72% of respondents reported using Kubernetes in production — a significant increase from 40% in November 2018.

As a result, the number of people who rate Kubernetes fell from 42 percent to 17 percent.



Evaluating the performance of a product using an evaluation method

We also see the growth of Kubernetes’ production clusters at both ends of the deployment spectrum. Most of the organizations surveyed in China use fewer than 10 clusters, but the number of organizations running more than 50 clusters has increased. This may be due to an increase in the number of new respondents using containers in production, which increases the cluster.

Thirty-six percent of respondents have two to five clusters, up from 25 percent in November 2018, half of respondents use one to five clusters, and 70 percent use one to 10. Just over 13% of respondents had more than 50 clusters in production, compared to 5% in November 2018.



If you use Kubernetes, how many production clusters do you have?

packaging

Helm was the most popular way to package Kubernetes applications, with 54% of respondents choosing this method

The entrance

Nginx (54%) is the most used Kubernetes portal provider, followed by HAProxy (18%), F5 (16%) and Envoy (15%).

Separate the Kubernetes application

Managing objects in a cluster is a challenge, but namespaces help with management by filtering and controlling them by group. Seventy-one percent of respondents used namespaces to separate Kubernetes applications. 68% of respondents who use Kubernetes on multiple teams use namespaces.

Monitoring, logging, and tracing

For users who use monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions, it is more common to run locally or to host via a remote server. Forty-six percent of respondents use local monitoring tools, while 20 percent run through remote services. Use of logging and tracing is low overall, but 26% of respondents run tracing locally, while 20% run tracing through remote services. Twenty-one percent of enterprises run tracking tools internally, and another 21 percent run through remote services.

code

Supported by continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), the power of the cloud and container together drives the speed of development and deployment in China. Our survey quantifies the speed of development by how often developers check code into the repository. 35% of respondents check in code multiple times per day. 43% check in code several times a week and 16% check in code several times a month.



How often do you check in code?

A few times A month

Multiple times a day

A few times A week

The majority of respondents publish once a week (43 percent), while just over a fifth (21 percent) publish once a month. Eighteen percent reported it once a day. Twelve percent work on a specific schedule.



What is your release cycle?

CI/CD

Many people believe that the foundation of successful CI/CD is process automation. However, our survey in China shows that purely automated environments are relatively rare – only 21% of respondents use an automated release cycle, while 31% rely on manual processes. The most popular option, at 46%, is a hybrid.



Is your release cycle manual or automatic?

CI/CD is a philosophy and technology that enables flexible delivery and lifecycle management of cloud native systems. Jenkins is the most popular CI/CD tool in the Chinese community, accounting for 53% of more than half of the community, and GitLab for 40%.

Cloud and internal deployment

Clouds are growing, but this year’s survey in China shows a shift away from public clouds, consolidation of private clouds, and the emergence of hybrid clouds. Public cloud use appears to have peaked at 51% in the November 2018 survey, and has dropped to 36% this year. Private clouds remained stable at 42%, up from 43% in November 2018. Hybrid clouds are the new choice this year, accounting for 39%.



Which of the following data centers does your company/organization use?

Private Cloud

The Public cloud

Hybrid Cloud

Other Other

Cloud native project

CNCF manages a large number of open source projects that are critical to cloud native development, deployment, and lifecycle management. CNCF projects are growing exponentially in China. For example, 57% of respondents use Prometheus monitoring and alerting systems, a significant increase from 16% in March 2018. 35% of respondents now use Coredns, up from 10% in March 2018. The Containerd runtime has also seen phenomenal growth — from 3% in March 2018 to 29% in early 2019.

CNCF is also hosting four projects created in China that are being used more widely in the region. Dragonfly (17% in production) and KubeEdge (11% in production) are the two most commonly used sandbox projects, and both are currently in the incubation stage. Harbor and TIKV are graduate projects, with 27% and 5% of respondents in production, respectively.



Graduated CNCF project used

* Not included: new graduate program ROOK



Incubate CNCF projects for use

* Not included: New Incubator Projects Argo, Contour, and Operator Framework. Rook is now a graduate project.

The benefits of using cloud-native projects in production have shifted since CNCF’s last China survey:

  • Faster deployment times were the biggest benefit for the first time, cited by 47% of respondents.
  • Improved scalability retains its early second place at 35%.
  • Cost savings still rank third, at 33%.
  • Improved developer productivity, cloud mobility and improved availability tied for fourth place, with 31% of respondents. In November 2018, it ranked first in usability and fourth in portability.

There is no server

Does your organization use serverless technology?

In the Chinese survey, 36% of respondents used hosted platforms as serverless and 22% used installable software.



Which serverless hosting platform does your organization use?

For those using hosted platforms as serverless tools, the top three providers are AliCloud FunctionalComputing (46%), AWS Lambda (34%), and Tencent Cloud Serverless Cloud FunctionStage and Huawei (12%).



Which serverless installable platform does your organization use?

For those using installable software as a serverless tool, Kubeless ranked first (29%), followed by Knative (22%), and Apache Openwhisk (20%).

In 2019, we added new issues to our cloud native storage and service network. These are popular cloud native projects that support these benefits in an active production environment:

storage



Does your organization use cloud native storage projects in production?

The most commonly used cloud native Storage items are Ceph (24%), Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) (23%), and Container Storage Interface (CSI) (18%).

Service network



Does your organization use service networks in production?

China cloud native community

CNCF now has nearly 50 members in China. China is also the third largest contributor (in terms of contributors and contributors) to CNCF projects, after the United States and Germany.

We have some case studies of Chinese companies, including:

  • JD uses Harbor to save about 60% of maintenance time for its private image central storage.
  • CMBC improved its delivery efficiency by 3-4 times and doubled its resource utilization using Kubernetes.
  • Ant Financial uses cloud-native technology and improves its operations at least tenfold.

We have also run Kubernetes and Cloud Native courses in China with more than 20,000 participants, and recently completed the first China Cloud Native + Open Source Virtual Summit.

The Chinese community is learning about cloud native technologies in many different ways.



How do you understand cloud native technologies?

Documentation files

Technical Podcast

KubeCon+ CloudNativeCon

Meetups and Local Events

Kubernetes Blog

Trade press articals, blogs, etc

Articles Articles

Technical Webinars seminar

CNCF Website

Twitter

A case study of Kubernetes

Business- Orientied Webinars Business oriented seminar

CNCF Webinars CNCF Seminar

Industry Analyst Reports/Data

Case Study Podcasts

Other Other

The document

72% of Chinese respondents learned about cloud native technology through documentation. Each CNCF project has extensive documentation on its website, which can be found here.

CNCF invests thousands of dollars each year to improve project documentation. These include project document hosting, adding tutorials, how-to guides, and more.

activity

Events are a popular way for respondents to learn about cloud-native technologies.

Kubecon + CloudNativeCon was chosen by 41% of respondents as the place to learn new technology. The next virtual Kubecon + CloudNativeCon is scheduled for November 17th, solstice 20th.

37% of respondents chose gatherings and local events, such as Cloud Native Community Groups, as a way to learn about cloud-native technologies.

webinars

Twenty-two percent of respondents learned about cloud native technologies through technology webinars, while another eight percent chose business-oriented webinars, and another eight percent chose CNCF webinars.

CNCF has strengthened its webinar program and plans to schedule regular webinars for Chinese audiences. You can view the upcoming schedule and videos, slides, and replays of previous webinars here.

About survey methods and interviewees

Many thanks to everyone who participated in this survey!

The survey was conducted in October 2019. The survey was conducted in Chinese and 97 percent of the 300 respondents were from Asia.



What is the size of your company/organization?



What industry does your company/organization belong to?

A: Financial services

Government administration

Healthcare medical

Hotel and Food Services

Manufacturing Manufacturing

/ an Analyst/an Analyst

Non – profit nonprofit

Professional Services

Technology Technology

Transportation traffic

Retail Retail

B: Real estate, rental, leasing

Scientific or technical services

Software Software

Telecommunications communication

B: Transportation and Transportation

Utilities equipment

Other Other



What is your job function?

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