Skills and security continue to cloud the promise of cloud platforms

IN KubeCon and CloudNativeCon events that have just ended in Europe, and one thing has become clear: opportunities are outpacing the ability of organizations to take advantage of their potential benefits. Keith Townsend, who attended the conference, observed in a tweet that “talent and education are the number one challenge. At the moment, I don’t see a working way to migrate thousands of applications without a lot of resources. There’s more work than people and money.”

Really. Information technology is becoming more complex every day and there is no shortage of demand for monitoring and automation capabilities in building and managing systems. Cloud platforms are seen as a means of protection not only for improved maintenance, monitoring and automation, but also for modernizing infrastructure and achieving faster time to market. At the same time, the skills and security of cloud systems remain major issues.

These points were confirmed in a research of more than 1,300 global respondents from Canonicalthe publisher of Ubuntu. The survey found that 83% use hybrid or multi-cloud, but nearly 50% say a lack of in-house skills and limited talent hinder migration to or use of Kubernetes and containers.

The mentioned advantages of cloud technologies include elasticity and flexibility, optimization of resources and reduced maintenance costs.

Why go to Cloud Native?

• Improved maintenance, monitoring and automation (64%)
• Infrastructure modernization (44%)
• Faster time to market (26%)
• Lower total total infrastructure (18%)

Main advantages of cloud technologies for business

• Elasticity and agility (50%)
• Resource optimization (27%)
• Reduced maintenance costs (21%)
• Faster time to market (21%)
• Cloud portability (19%)
• Developer productivity (19%)

The study examines exactly where applications run. At least 14% of respondents said they do everything on Kubernetes, over 20% said on bare metals and virtual machines, and over 29% said a combination of bare metal, virtual machines and Kubernetes. “This distribution shows how the flexibility of Kubernetes allows organizations to carry out the same type of workload everywhere,” the report said.

Security continues to be a problem for cloud and Kubernetes users, with 38% of respondents believing that security is the most important consideration, whether working with Kubernetes, building container images or defining a final strategy. Significantly, only 14% report that they have “mastered” security in the cloud’s home space.

The biggest challenges facing Kubernetes and the implementation of containers

• Lack of internal skills / limited workforce (48%)
• IT structure of the company (38%)
• Incompatibility with legacy systems (32%)
• Users of difficult learning (29%)
• Security and compliance issues are not adequately addressed (25%)
• Integrating cloud applications together (22%)
• Poor or limited support from platform providers or partners (17%)
• Requirements for networking are not adequately addressed ( 17%)
• Excess of expenses (16%)
• Storage / data requirements are not adequately addressed (16%)
• The requirements for observation / monitoring are not considered (15%)

Among the use cases cited for cloud environments, the re-architecture of own solutions in microservices ranks as a leading activity. However, one contributor to the report expressed caution about the use of micro-services. “If you look at microservices as a panacea, then you will be disappointed,” he said Tim Hawkin, Chief Software Engineer for Google Cloud Platform and Associate of the Report. “It’s a way to organize teams. Microservices provide a good way to do this. But if you think it will accept a bad application and do it well, then you will be disappointed. Or if your application is unreliable, or follows the big ball of muddy architecture, then it will also be difficult. ”

Leading examples of cloud use

• Restructuring of own solution in micro-services (19%)
• Deployment and testing of applications in CI / CD pipeline (15%)
• Switching to an open source solution (13%)
• Manage or enable hybrid cloud setup (11%)
• Implementation or management of Kubernetes as a service (10%)
• Orchestration of workloads in multi-cloud setting (10%)

Even with the relentless rise of cloud computing, there is still a push and pull between local and external approaches. “When people mention a lack of skills as a blocker, the truth is that they are often already in an environment where they are ready to do the next thing, but they don’t have the infrastructure or organizational support to do it,” he said. Ken Saip, a senior corporate architect affiliated with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Edward Jones. “It’s also a matter of buying versus building: when buying a solution and a related service, the organization takes advantage of the use of external resources and a set of skills without having to build its capabilities. applying its engineering discipline, which can be a useful differentiator. “