Study Reveals Surge in Cloud-Native Adoption to Accelerate Business-Critical Application Delivery

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Cloud-native applications harness the cloud’s limitless potential and can reach their true potential to fuel innovation as they become easier to change and integrate with other systems. As such, most new applications will be built in cloud-native platforms over the next five years.

According to Pure Storage’s report, The Voice of Kubernetes Experts Report 2024: The Data Trends Driving the Future of the Enterprise, 80% of respondents confirmed that all or most of their new applications will be built in cloud-native platforms, and for their cloud-native technology, they prefer the flexibility of deploying in hybrid cloud environments, with 86% confirming they run their cloud-native technology across both public and private clouds.

The report explores the top priorities and trends in the cloud-native landscape, including modern virtualization, cloud-native database and AI/ML adoption using Kubernetes, and the rise of platform engineering. 

According to the report, traditional VM infrastructure is at an inflection point. More than half (58%) of organizations plan to migrate some of their VM workloads to Kubernetes, and 65% plan to migrate VM workloads within the next two years.

The report also found that nearly all (98%) of respondents run data-intensive workloads on cloud-native platforms, with critical apps like databases (72%), analytics (67%), and AI/ML workloads (54%) being built on Kubernetes.

Ninety-six percent of respondents state they already have platform engineering teams to increase the scalability and flexibility of their apps. Executives have shown a willingness to invest in training (63%), consultants (60%), and hiring skilled engineers (52%) to support this function.

The rise of cloud-native platforms marks a fundamental shift in how businesses conceptualize, develop, and deploy applications at scale. Recognizing the benefits, organizations are migrating their VMs to cloud-native platforms to drive enhanced scalability, flexibility, and operational simplicity – all while reducing overall costs.

Amid this transformation, Kubernetes has matured from an emerging technology to a cornerstone for modern applications over the past decade, supporting the most data-intensive workloads that fuel enterprise innovation—from real-time analytics to AI and machine learning to databases, and more. This shift has elevated the role of platform engineering, which is responsible for managing the infrastructure that enables efficient application development, deployment, and management within containerized environments.

“Experienced platform leaders run mission-critical applications like databases, analytics, and AI/ML on Kubernetes at massive scale in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It’s no surprise that these platform leaders are also paving the way for VMs to be managed by Kubernetes without compromising enterprise requirements, supported by solutions like Red Hat OpenShift and Portworx,” said Murli Thirumale, VP & GM, Portworx by Pure Storage.

Thirumale added that the latest findings underscore the urgency of elevating the platform engineering role to manage infrastructure alongside the application stack for seamless innovation.

“The latest data findings confirm what we’ve seen across industries: cloud-native strategies are becoming more prominent with organizations now focusing on operationalizing cloud-native environments with data, security, sustainability, and cost considerations, said Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director of Cloud Data Management, IDC.

“The advancements in cloud-native stacks and platform engineering facilitate faster development and a balanced co-existence of VMs and containers. While migrating VM-based applications to Kubernetes remains challenging, robust data services and container platforms enable accelerated development, seamless management, automation, and optimized IT infrastructure,” added Venkatraman.