Pure Storage report highlights shift to cloud-native platforms

Pure Storage has released a new report in collaboration with Dimensional Research, revealing a significant shift towards cloud-native platforms among IT professionals. The report, titled "The Voice of Kubernetes Experts Report 2024: The Data Trends Driving the Future of the Enterprise," highlights several key trends and priorities within the cloud-native landscape, emphasising modern virtualisation, cloud-native databases, AI/ML adoption using Kubernetes, and the growing importance of platform engineering.

The survey, which includes responses from 527 IT professionals with at least four years of experience in managing data services within a Kubernetes environment, presents several notable findings. One of the most striking is that 80% of respondents expect all or most of their new applications to be built in cloud-native platforms over the next five years. Moreover, 86% prefer the flexibility of deploying these cloud-native technologies in hybrid cloud environments.

The report reveals an inflection point for traditional VM infrastructure, with more than half (58%) of organisations planning to migrate some of their VM workloads to Kubernetes and 65% intending to complete these migrations within the next two years. This migration is driven by the need to enhance scalability, flexibility, and operational simplicity while reducing costs.

Cloud-native platforms are increasingly being utilised for data-intensive workloads. The survey highlights that 98% of respondents run such workloads on these platforms, with critical applications like databases (72%), analytics (67%), and AI/ML workloads (54%) being built on Kubernetes. This trend underscores the role Kubernetes plays in supporting the most data-intensive workloads, thus driving enterprise innovation.

Platform engineering is deemed essential for cloud-native success, with 96% of those surveyed already having dedicated platform engineering teams to increase application scalability and flexibility. Additionally, executives are showing a willingness to invest in this area, with 63% investing in training, 60% in consultants, and 52% in hiring skilled engineers to support platform engineering functions.

Murli Thirumale, Vice President and General Manager of Portworx by Pure Storage, commented: "Experienced platform leaders are running 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. The latest findings underscore the urgency of elevating the platform engineering role to manage infrastructure alongside the application stack for seamless innovation."

Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director for Cloud Data Management at IDC, added: "The latest Portworx by Pure Storage data findings confirm what we've seen across industries: cloud-native strategies are becoming more prominent with organisations now focusing on operationalising cloud-native environments with data, security, sustainability, and cost considerations. The advancements in cloud-native stacks and platform engineering are facilitating 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 are making it possible, enabling accelerated development, seamless management, automation, and optimised IT infrastructure."

The report underscores the transformative impact of cloud-native platforms on business-critical application delivery. Kubernetes has evolved from an emerging technology to a foundational component for modern applications, supporting a range of data-intensive workloads from real-time analytics to machine learning. This evolution is driving organisations to rethink their application development, deployment, and management processes, highlighting the critical role of platform engineering in this new landscape.