Kubernetes guardrails helped organizations correct 36% more CPU and memory issues
BOSTON, MA (January 17, 2023) – Fairwinds, the leading provider of Kubernetes governance software, has issued the Kubernetes Benchmark Report 2023. The annual report evaluated the results from more than 150,000 workloads and hundreds of organizations and found that Kubernetes workloads are not being configured according to best practices, which puts the security, reliability and cost efficiency of their clusters at risk.
While the results showed a worsening of configuration issues, there are areas where Kubernetes guardrails are helping accelerate remediation. Organizations that implemented Kubernetes guardrails in shift-left scenarios or at time of deployment were able to correct 36% more issues where CPU and memory configurations were missing than those that did not use guardrails. Additionally, companies leveraging guardrails were able to repair 15% more image vulnerabilities than those not using them.
“As Kubernetes usage expands, it’s harder for DevOps teams to manage configuration risk introduced by new teams,” said Danielle Cook, VP of Marketing at Fairwinds. “Regardless of whether developers are using cloud native technologies or are building infrastructure, Kubernetes guardrails can help them ensure their platform is secure, highly performant and cost-effective. Without these best practices, they won’t realize the benefits of their container and Kubernetes investments, nor will their organizational leaders understand the value these powerful technologies can bring.”
Additional key findings include:
44% of organizations are running 71% or more of their workloads as allowing root access, an increase of 22 percentage points in the last year. This is surprising given the known CVEs targeting this issue.
25% of organizations are seeing greater than 90% of workloads impacted by image vulnerabilities, an increase of more than 200% from the previous year.
46% of organizations have at least half of their workloads running on outdated Helm charts, up from 33% in the prior year. Some organizations even have 100% of their workloads impacted by outdated Helm charts.
30% of organizations have at least 50% of their workloads set with memory limits too high, resulting in wasted/unnecessary resources. This is a dramatic increase from only 3% of organizations last year with workloads impacted at 50% or higher.
Kubernetes governance is critical to successful cloud native adoption. Without it, practitioners have no way to improve the reliability, security and efficiency of their applications. The Fairwinds Kubernetes Benchmark Report was created to provide visibility into misconfigurations so DevOps teams can better understand their cluster deficiencies, where to make investments and how to configure Kubernetes to have a positive business impact.
Fairwinds Insights provides Kubernetes security, cost, compliance and guardrails in one platform.
Users gain visibility into their Kubernetes workloads security, cost usage and reliability, which helps them avoid expensive misconfigurations. The all-in-one governance platform helps DevOps team simplify Kubernetes and enable developer self-service to achieve production-readiness faster.
To read the full Kubernetes Configuration Benchmark Report 2023, please visit https://www.fairwinds.com/kubernetes-config-benchmark-report.
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