TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alcide, the Kubernetes security leader empowering DevSecOps teams with end-to-end continuous security guardrails for Kubernetes deployments, today announced the key findings from its recent Kubernetes usage survey alongside its expert predictions for what DevOps and SecOps teams can expect in 2020. With the market split between those who have gained experience and are running Kubernetes in production, and those who are still learning the ropes, Alcide foresees a strong shift toward security solutions tailor made to protect K8s as more threats and vulnerabilities are unveiled.
Based on about 200 responses from Dev, Ops, Security and Cloud Architects teams, the latest Alcide Kubernetes survey reveals that 45% of companies are now running Kubernetes in production, while 37% are leveraging hybrid or multi-cloud environments for their K8s clusters. The rapid adoption of Kubernetes, driven by the implementation of microservices (60%), improved innovation velocity and time to market (53%), and application scaling (44%), has created a K8s expertise gap with only 20% of teams considering themselves Kubernetes pros. This lack of experience is resulting in 50% of teams not feeling confident their K8s deployments are secure, while 67% anticipate their use of K8s security tools in 2020 to increase. The explosive adoption of Kubernetes, the growing threats and the shortage of experienced users are in the base of Alcide’s K8s predictions for 2020.
“As K8s gains more steam in production, the need for integrated CI+CD security which equally addresses the needs of those starting out and those scaling K8s will drive continuous innovations in intelligent and automated security solutions in 2020,” says Gadi Naor, co-founder and CTO of Alcide. “Community-driven projects such as Helm 3, Jaeger, and KUDO will play a pivotal role in advancing new capabilities across the cloud-native software development lifecycle that will bolster K8s as the digital transformation engine of the 21st century.”
Alcide believes the following five trends will shape the Kubernetes market in 2020 and will drive continuous innovation:
- More flexible workload deployment on the edge for Kubernetes: In 2020, as companies expand their use of edge computing with hardware designed to run containerized applications in physically restricted or low-power environments, conducting tasks such as connecting to PoS and real-time analysis of data, data protection for such scenarios will require more than traditional backup and recovery. Security in such a cloud-native environment will require tools that can continuously scan workloads and ensure they remain secure and compliant. Expect to see more emphasis on security capabilities that are designed to protect K8s on-the-Edge deployments.
- Increased need and use of intelligent and automated security for Kubernetes environments: with 41% of companies now hosting their Kubernetes clusters on the public cloud, and 37% using hybrid or multi-cloud environments, cloud-native teams will need intelligent and automated tools to address the increasing risks. As privilege escalation flaws such as the infamous CVE-2018-1002105, which make it possible for any user to gain full administrator privileges on the entire cluster, companies will seek specific, intelligent Kubernetes solutions that will automatically adapt to the unique needs of specific hosting environments.
- K8s deployment and management tools get a community uplift: Helm, the de-facto tool for collaborating when creating, installing, and managing applications inside of Kubernetes, just got an uplift with Helm 3. With over 500 community members who have contributed code to the Helm CLI since its inception, the popularity of Helm, supported by thousands of community members actively maintaining charts on the Helm Hub, has given us Helm 3 which continues to grow and mature. These upgrades to Helm will further cement its position as the leading tool for creating, installing, and managing applications inside of Kubernetes.
- Growing Skills Gap drives simplified, managed solutions for Kubernetes: The “brutal learning curve” associated with Kubernetes, summed up by K8s pundit Ian Coldwater on Twitter after this year’s KubeCon in San Diego, creates a wide K8s expertise gap across organizations. The acquisition of Katacoda by O’Reilly, which provides interactive learning scenarios and sandboxes for new technologies including K8s, points to the rise of new learning resources to address the growing demand for Kubernetes expertise. In addition, the release of the Kubernetes Universal Declarative Framework (KUDO) spearheaded by CNCF - a declarative operator development toolkit at runtime which makes writing operators productive, code free and simple, so operator developers and end users can continue to use the tools they’re already familiar with to manage stateful services - has the potential to enable developers to deploy their applications more easily and give Ops the tools to operate those applications and understand how they’re behaving within their environments without being K8s experts. Expect a trend toward K8s education and simplified implementation and operation throughout 2020.
- K8s observability, and operationalizing distributed tracing: The distributed nature of cloud-native applications, especially those deployed on K8s and Service Mesh, present an order of magnitude larger problem surface for engineering when it comes to troubleshooting service and application failures, availability or health.
The many east-west transactions, inherent in such environments - among services, their traffic, or the containers that trigger or consume them, require a new approach to observability, debugging and runtime analysis, called distributed tracing. The graduation of Jaeger, a distributed tracing platform stewarded by CNCF, shows the growing need for such systems for increasingly complex K8s clusters going forward.
“We are excited to see there is a wider awareness and market understanding that continuous deployment and runtime are distinct yet interconnected phases of the cloud-native software lifecycle,” adds Amir Ofek, CEO of Alcide. “I am proud of the Alcide’s ability to foresee these trends ahead of the market and respond with innovative solutions such as the Alcide Advisor and our newly launched Alcide kAudit, which uniquely address the specific needs of CD scans and runtime detection of security risks in a way that manages the complexity of Kubernetes for users.”
About Alcide
Alcide is a Kubernetes security leader empowering DevOps to implement and maintain security guardrails through their CI/CD pipelines and aiding security teams to protect their growing Kubernetes deployments with continuous security. Alcide provides a K8s-native, AI-driven security platform for configuration risks, visibility, runtime security events, and a single policy framework across Kubernetes clusters.
www.alcide.io, LinkedIn, Twitter
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