“Worldwide container management revenue will grow strongly from a small base of $465.8 million in 2020, to reach $944 million in 2024.” Gartner, Inc.

Gartner predicts that public cloud container orchestration and serverless container offerings will produce the most considerable expansion in this area.

“[…] by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production.” Gartner, Inc.

Kubernetes can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud, and provides a system of fast delivery and lifecycle management. As demand for enterprise container management grows in production environments, several factors need to be considered.

• As with every environment, security is a must, whether through official compliances or patching CVEs. A system must be in place to monitor these vulnerabilities efficiently and effectively.
• As workloads are migrated to Kubernetes, enterprise environments need to be aware of where they are in the maturity model, and present a proactive approach to optimizing and automating for maximum efficiency.
• Expertise is required to navigate the complexities of deployment and maintenance within Kubernetes environments.
• Transparent reporting is required, across the entire enterprise, to prove compliance.
• Regulatory compliance is required at a high standard to ensure audits are passed first time, alleviating the possibility of audit failures and possible financial penalties.

Kubernetes maturity model

As with all areas of business, when deploying technology, environments develop through several cycles before becoming fully mature. It is important to understand where your environment currently is and what is required to achieve complete optimization.

It is a common misconception that deployment is the first step in a maturity model, preparation is the key to any successful transformation, ensuring a full understanding of costs, technical objectives, intended achievements, ecosystem workflows and internal policies and practices that must be adhered to, to prove the value of the transformation to the business.

Deployment of containerised environments should follow best practices and requires the employ of Kubernetes experts to ensure a flawless transition. Poorly executed deployments can become costly and time consuming, preventing teams from being proactive in other areas.

Enhanced optimization is possibly the most critical phase of the maturity model, ensuring that misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and security non-compliances are mitigated. At this stage, many SMEs will feel that they have achieved their goals for compliance – although, post optimization, configuration drift and new security flaws will need to be addressed – and it is important to ensure that deep insights can be gained through a system which provides complete transparency of the environment.

As environments become mature and controlled, companies of all sizes need to ensure that they have the correct tool in place so that administrators have the correct information and clear visibility into remediation and optimizing efficiency. Visibility is required for insights into security compliance and best practices, to enable six sigma uptime and business continuity.

Optimizing and automating systems requires the correct tools to alleviate human error. At this point administrators should be looking to maximize efficiency and reliability working towards a serverless architecture to build microservice applications.

One of the greatest mistakes that companies can make is to assume that when they have reached Phase 5: Optimize and automate, that their work is done. In truth, the maturity model should be a cycle. New deployments will always need to be planned, deployed, enhanced, monitored, and optimized. Even existing deployments will still need to roll back to Phase 3: Enhance optimization, as best practices and security compliance evolve.

Orchestrating the future with Kubernetes

Orchestrating containers on a cluster of compute nodes is relatively easy, but requires the correct skill set for enterprise adoption. Global predictions show that there will be a huge demand for Kubernetes administrators and a lack of skill on the market, leaving a skill deficit. With requirements for security governance, best practices, and audit readiness, proficient Seasoned Kubernetes administrators are required to ensure enterprise environments meet the strictest of requirements.

Building an environment which encompasses the Kubernetes maturity model is no easy task, and even the most proficient administrators need a tool which can provide overview information for issues, and remediation scripts to ensure they can proactively carry out their duties. Without such a tool, administrators become locked in the reactive break-fix cycle where something goes wrong, then it needs to be discovered, understood, and then a time-consuming search for remediation information takes place – and only then can something be done about the problem. With the correct tool in place, all this time can be given back to the administrator, allowing them to be proactive in the environment and remediate issues before they become problems.

As trends push towards container-as-a-service (CaaS) and function-as-a-service (FaaS), administrators need to ensure that the services they are deploying are secure and conform to best practices. Service providers that are looking after the underlying infrastructure are accountable for their own security and best practice adoption, but this does not mean that container deployments will meet the same compliance.

By factoring in a FaaS or serverless approach, compute and storage utilization can be decoupled and managed more efficiently. As microservices grow, complete visibility into the environment’s compliance is required along with the correct skills and training to stay abreast of everchanging and progressing compliance demands.

As Kubernetes grows in public cloud container orchestration and serverless container offerings, enterprises will struggle to gain the skilled administrators required for the upkeep of large deployments. Tools providing visibility, reporting and remediation scripts will become a must have, and companies that do not adopt the correct tools will fall behind the curve and not be able to mature in their deployments, leaving the possibility for breaches, downtime and financial penalties that can greatly hamper business continuity and growth.

Author: Steve Salisbury Product Marketing Specialist
Bio: Steve Salisbury has an IT background spanning eLearning production, website creation, programming, and software and hardware consultancy. With degrees in pedagogy, compute, and music production, Steve’s broad skill set enables him to be proactive in many areas, such as creating marketing collateral, thought leadership, technical documentation creation, and creating enablement media. As well as enjoying outdoor activities such as camping, hiking, and cycling, Steve is a voiceover artist, sound production engineer, writes his own songs, plays numerous instruments, and enjoys time in his recording studio producing music.