Today we are excited to announce the results of our annual CNCF Survey for 2019!

The survey of the community provides a better understanding of how and where cloud native technologies are being adopted. This is the seventh time we have conducted an assessment of the cloud native marketplace.

As CNCF grows, we’re in an excellent position to measure the trends among users of open source technologies. We love learning about what our community is doing as members continue to push the envelope of innovation and open source.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the use of many cloud native technologies has become ubiquitous. More than half of our graduated projects have reached more than 50% use in production, with many more projects experiencing fast growth. Cloud native software is simplifying the building of complex applications, while at the same time enabling organizations to build and deploy these applications faster.

Containers have become the norm, reaching 84% use in production this year, up from 23% in our first survey in 2016. Many new projects in serverless, service mesh, and storage are emerging as popular ways to manage or work in conjunction with containers.

Key takeaways from this year’s findings include:

The use of cloud native projects in production continues to grow, with many projects reaching more than 50% use in production. This includes more than half of CNCF’s graduated projects: Kubernetes (78%), Prometheus (72%), CoreDNS (69%), Fluentd (64%), and contianerd (53%). Additionally, all graduated projects saw an increase in use in production.

18% of respondents are using a service mesh in production. 47% are evaluating the use of a service mesh in their organization. For those using and/or evaluating a service mesh, the most popular were:

At least 41% of respondents are using serverless technologies. Of those who are using serverless, 80% use a hosted platform vs. 20% who use installable software. Of those using a hosted platform, the top tool is AWS Lambda (53%).

*Note, respondents could choose both hosted and installable as their serverless platform.

An increase in both the number and reliability of (CI/CD) tools is driving a decrease in manual release cycles and causing release cycles to accelerate. Those with daily release cycles increased from 15% in 2018 to 27%, and weekly release cycles increased from 20% to 28%. Hybrid models in 2019 are up to 41% compared to 25% in 2018. This can be attributed to a rise in available CI/CD tools, the most popular being Jenkins (58%), followed by GitLab (34%), and CircleCI (13%).

*Responses were multiple choice in 2019 vs. fill in the blank in 2018

The use of containers in production has increased significantly – 84% of respondents are using containers in production, up more than 15% from 2018. This is an impressive jump from 73% in 2018, and 23% in our first survey in 2016. This is a result of organizations having more trust in containers, and using them more in user-facing applications.

To learn more, please view the full report.

Keep your eyes peeled for an opportunity to participate in our next survey later this year. As the community grows, we look forward to learning more from you!