Over One Third of Kubernetes Organizations Lack Container Rightsizing: 2024 Kubernetes Benchmark Report

Fairwinds’s 2024 Kubernetes Benchmark Report Shows Workload Improvements, But Efficiency and Reliability Challenges

Boston, MA – (January 10, 2024) – Fairwinds, the leading provider of software for platform engineers to standardize Kubernetes and enable governance, today released the 2024 Kubernetes Benchmark Report. The annual report evaluated the results from more than 330,000 workloads and hundreds of organizations. Over the last three years, Kubernetes users have made significant efforts to improve workload efficiency and reliability using tools to identify misconfigurations.

“Adoption of Kubernetes continues to grow and users are becoming more skilled in workload management,” said Joe Pelletier, VP of Product at Fairwinds. “This last year we’ve seen improvements as organizations use software to help identify Kubernetes misconfigurations and gain actionable results with a focus on maximizing cost efficiency. This has helped reduce the percentage of workloads impacted by efficiency, reliability and security misconfigurations.”

Container efficiency has become of particular importance as organizations look to cut down on cloud costs. This year's Kubernetes Benchmark Report shows that 37% of organizations have 50% or more workloads that require container rightsizing to improve efficiency. Pelletier continued, “As companies grow their container usage, they recognize that rightsizing needs to become part of their workflow and need to answer a simple question: Does the container need to be rightsized or not? If the answer is yes, then the next question is: by how much?”

Fairwinds helps platform engineers rightsize application resources by identifying wasteful compute and providing developers with accurate and actionable resource recommendations that they can actually implement.

Notable Kubernetes Benchmark results include:

• Organizations are preventing privilege escalation: 15% reduction in the number of organizations running 90% of their workloads on containers allowing privilege escalation.
• Organizations are getting a handle on workloads running as root: Down from 44% in 2023, now only 30% of organizations have 71% or more of their workloads running as root access in 2024.
• Image vulnerabilities on the rise: in tracking image vulnerabilities over the last three years, we've seen a huge increase in the number of organizations with more than 90% of workloads impacted (9% in 2022 to 30% in 2024).
• Outdated container images increasingly a problem: this year has seen a spike in the number of organizations with 90% or more of workloads impacted by outdated container images - up by 13% (33% in 2023, 46% in 2024).
• Missing network policy: 58% of organizations have workloads that are missing network policy. That is surprisingly high, because setting network policy is an essential step to securing containers.
• Missing replicas impact stability: 55% of organizations have more than 21% of workloads missing replicas. On the plus side, there have been improvements for some organizations, with 30% having less than 10% of workloads impacted.

“Since the benchmark’s inception, the number of workloads analyzed has grown by more than three times,” continued Pelletier. “This year, we see that it remains challenging for organizations to identify and remediate misconfigurations in Kubernetes. By using a solution that scans workloads to identify misconfigurations automatically and provides actionable and automated fixes, all organizations can improve the security, reliability, and cost efficiency of their Kubernetes workloads.”

Fairwinds provides Insights, its software for helping platform teams implement standardization, which allows teams to get a handle on cloud costs and implement policy. With Fairwinds Insights, platform teams can stop being Kubernetes helpdesks by providing developers with ways to remediate code and adhere to compliance, security and FinOps policies.

Resources

• Kubernetes Benchmark Report
• Fairwinds Insights Overview

About Fairwinds

Fairwinds builds software for Kubernetes platform engineers to standardize and enable development best practices. With Fairwinds, platform teams decrease friction, increase dev velocity and improve the dev experience to accelerate time to market and revenue generation. Customers ship cloud native applications faster, more cost-effectively and with less risk. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA and provides a fully remote and distributed work environment. For more information, visit www.fairwinds.com, read our blog or follow @FairwindsOps on Twitter.

Contact
Haidee LeClair
haidee@fairwinds.com