Now that Kubernetes has turned 10, it has firmly established itself as a cornerstone of cloud-native deployment. That means it’s finally fair to request ten years of Kubernetes experience when writing job descriptions! While Kubernetes is undeniably complex, it also enables organizations to implement and customize it to fit their individual business needs. Looking ahead to 2025, we expect Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem to continue to grow and evolve. Drawing on our own experience and DZone’s Kubernetes in the Enterprise report, here are five things we expect to focus on in the Kubernetes ecosystem in the year ahead.
Containers exploded in popularity in 2013 when Docker emerged, and often people use the words Docker and container interchangeably. The key difference is that Docker also offered an ecosystem for container management. Kubernetes then emerged as a container orchestration system in 2014. Containers remain a staple in modern software architectures because they include everything an application needs to run (including libraries, system tools, code, and runtime), making it easier to deploy consistently across different environments. Container use has grown consistently over the years and is now holding steady at about 84%. Expect Docker and Kubernetes use in development and production environments to continue to rise as the technology and ecosystem mature.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that Kubernetes automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters. This ensures high availability and fault tolerance, and that’s why K8s is the most commonly used container management technology in production environments. The DZone report showed 76% of developers had personal experience working with Kubernetes, almost exactly the same percentage of organizations that indicated they were running K8s clusters (75%). There are many common use cases respondents shared, but the top three were hybrid/multi-cloud (54%), new cloud-native apps (49%), and modernizing existing apps (46%). Expect these use cases to remain stable and Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) and Edge / Internet of Things (IoT) use cases to rise in the year ahead.
Development teams continue to struggle with some aspects of Kubernetes. While they love the scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance it offers, many developers find that setting up, configuring, and managing Kubernetes is time consuming and resource intensive. The latest survey shows some areas where more than half of respondents believe Kubernetes has improved things for devs (CI/CD, deployment in general, auto scaling, and building microservices). There are other areas where it hasn’t helped, however. More than half of respondents shared that K8s had neither improved nor worsened architectural refactoring, security, application modularity, and overall system design. In some areas, notably cost (25%), architectural refactoring (15%), and security (13%), developers think Kubernetes has actually made things worse. In the year ahead, dev teams are going to push back on the requirement to learn K8s and ask for Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service and tools to make deploying to Kubernetes infrastructure easier so they can focus on building applications and services.
Kubernetes is a dynamic and distributed environment, which can make it more difficult to get insights into application performance, health, and resource utilization. Monitoring and observability make it easier to identify the root cause of performance bottlenecks, failures, or misconfigurations. Most DZone respondents (69%) are already using tools to monitor Kubernetes, relying on a variety of tools to monitor cloud-native and containerized apps (Grafana 65%, Prometheus 62%, followed by Splunk with 24%, and Datadog with 21%, and many other tools). This year, the majority of respondents (56%) indicated that their organization is also using AI for monitoring and observability. Right now, the most common uses of AI are for anomaly detection and performance analysis, but we expect this to change as more companies adopt AI-enabled tools to help them make the most of their Kubernetes investment.
Kubernetes both impacts and is impacted by software development systems, tools, and practices. The DZone report focused on three of these areas: cost optimization techniques, security, and microservices.
Kubernetes can help with cost optimization by automating resource allocation, scaling based on demand, and distributing workloads efficiently across nodes. In cloud environments, expenses can rise quickly, and it can be hard to determine where costs are coming from (and how to attribute them) in these ephemeral environments. Respondents shared that the top ways they’re managing and optimizing costs are through automation of manual processes (65%), containerization (62%), CI/CD (61%), with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and monitoring and analytics tied for fourth (59%). In 2025, we expect IaC and cloud optimization (currently at 56%) to rise significantly as well as failover and disaster recovery (currently 33%).
Kubernetes security can be challenging, but it’s important to protect containerized applications and infrastructure from unauthorized access, vulnerabilities, and potential malicious attacks. Organizations must implement network policies, secure container images, and regularly update Kubernetes itself and all related add-ons, APIs, and other components to minimize the risk of breaches and data leaks. Respondents shared that the top three ways they manage K8s’ security include updating Kubernetes regularly (67%), blocking or limiting network access to exposed ports (53%), and enabling role-based access control (52%). Fortunately, only 25% of respondents shared that they needed to reassess planned Kubernetes and/or container deployments to production due to security concerns in the past year. While most organizations may not have encountered a problem with Kubernetes security in 2024, expect malicious attackers to focus more on targeting K8s infrastructure as enterprises increasingly deploy mission-critical applications to production.
Many teams already run microservices on Kubernetes to take advantage of the simplified management of complex applications as well as improved scalability and reliability. Kubernetes automates microservice deployment, scaling, and monitoring, so each service runs independently and can be updated, scaled, or restarted without impacting other microservices. The DZone report showed that 87% of respondents use microservices, with 95% of them running microservices on Kubernetes. In 2025, expect the use of microservices on K8s to remain the same unless a new technology emerges to change the game.
As Kubernetes practitioners who have helped clients manage hundreds of clusters, here are five more predictions for the year ahead based on our hands-on experience:
In 2025, Kubernetes will further cement its position as a critical technology in enterprise software development. Its role in enabling scalable, portable, and efficient container and microservices orchestration across various environments will ensure its place as an indispensable tool for modern application deployment and management. As the ecosystem continues to evolve, we can expect to see improvements in ease of use, security, and support for emerging use cases like AI/ML and edge computing.
If your organization is ready to focus on building out your differentiators and optimizing development processes and release times instead of maintaining infrastructure in 2025, reach out. Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service can architect, build, and maintain your Kubernetes infrastructure so you can focus on what you do best.
