Survey states cloud native tech now standard in software development

Cloud native is having a watershed moment. At a critical point marking a significant change, software development for cloud native application architectures have recently become a default practice. The proof? More than half of organizations in 451 Research’s Cloud native approaches are now default software development practices survey report they now have cloud native technologies and methodologies currently in use. But that’s not all. 

Looking ahead, this year’s survey respondents expect to make even greater commitments to cloud native as they move their IT modernization initiatives forward. 

“Approximately 60% of companies surveyed using cloud native resources say more than half of their applications are currently architected using cloud native, rising to 77% when organizations project two years into the future,” S&P Global Market Intelligence analyst William Fellows writes.

Cloud native approaches optimize software architectures, as they use DevOps, microservices, platform engineering, and Kubernetes, to constantly deliver software updates and iterate as necessary, instead of large batch updates every few months. This helps explain why adoption is strong across all sizes of organizations in the current survey — a change from only large businesses a year ago. Moreover, adoption remains most robust among digital transformation leaders as executives look for benefits across critical areas:

• Operational efficiency – Two thirds (66%) of respondents say IT operations efficiency is their top cloud native benefit.
• Sustainability – Almost half (45%) of organizations surveyed are experiencing sustainability benefits as a result of cloud native adoption.
• Security – Just under half (44%) of respondents are seeing security benefits from cloud native approaches.

The IT decision makers surveyed cite improvements to developer speed and productivity (43%), cost reduction (40%), and improved time to market (40%) as additional key benefits.

Despite acknowledging cloud native practices’ security and compliance as well as complexity and cost challenges, organizations are persevering on their cloud native journeys. 

More than six in ten organizations (65%) say at least half of their cloud native software is internally developed. Yet for a majority of respondents, both managed services and platform engineering teams overseeing internal development environments (IDEs) that enable self-service access to compliant infrastructure are now essential. These solutions are ideal for reducing complexities associated with Kubernetes and serverless products, allowing teams to take advantage of cloud native flexibility while continuing to reduce technical debt. 

451 analyst Fellows calls out the strong motion toward managed services. “About 65% of respondent organizations that currently use self-managed container systems say they will adopt a managed service for container management within 12 months.”

As organizations dive deeper into cloud native software development and deployment practices, the deluge of data can be overwhelming. Cloud native observability solutions such as Chronosphere cut complexity and empower teams to gain visibility into all of their data—with complete control over costs. 

With Chronosphere, developers find and fix issues faster, saving valuable time and resources. Financial provider Affirm, for example, is saving 14,000 developer hours a year with the Chronosphere platform while Snap, Inc. engineers are experiencing a 90% reduction in on-call pages.