Security used to be the biggest challenge companies implementing cloud native technologies faced, but according to a new report from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), that is no longer the case.

The CNCF’s 2024 Cloud Native Survey, which surveyed 750 members of the CNCF community, revealed that cultural changes are now the top challenge, with 55% of respondents citing this as the number one issue.  

“When cloud native computing was maturing, technical issues like security, networking, storage, and observability were major pain points. Today, though, more seasoned cloud native practices have helped make technical challenges more manageable, meaning organizations can focus their attention on culture and process shifts. Whether it’s a move to platform engineering or GitOps, or a transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices one, these culture-change efforts are the logical, if tricky, next steps in the cloud native evolution, as the survey results reflect,” the CNCF wrote in the report.

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The previous year’s survey results had security and complexity as the two biggest challenges, at 42% and 38% of respondents, respectively. Now, security is the fourth biggest challenge at 37% and complexity is at number six at 35%. 

They found that 60% of organizations are now vetting open source projects for active communities and 57% are using automated tools to detect vulnerabilities, indicating that security measures are improving. 

The second and third biggest challenges cited this year were CI/CD issues (40%, up from 25% in 2023) and lack of training (38%, up from 28% in 2023).

Cloud native usage is at an all-time high

The report also found that 89% of respondents had adopted cloud native technologies. Twenty-four percent said that all of their development and deployment were using cloud native technologies, up from 20% in 2023. 

Additionally, 36% said that most of their development and deployment were with cloud native, and 28% said some of it was.

The report also found that adoption was similar across all company sizes, indicating that all companies are seeing the benefits, not just the largest ones.

How AI is being used with Kubernetes

The report suggests that AI adoption in Kubernetes is still in its early days, with 48% of respondents saying they haven’t yet deployed AI workloads.

Of those that are working with AI, they’re using Kubernetes for batch jobs (11%), model experimentation (10%), real-time model inference (10%), and data pre-processing (9%). 

Other findings of the report

The CNCF also found that:

  • 80% of organizations are using Kubernetes in production, compared to 66% in 2023
  • 60% of organizations are using CI/CD for most or all of their applications
  • 77% of organizations are using GitOps principles
  • Service mesh adoption declined from 50% in 2023 to 42% in 2024, mainly due to the associated overhead costs