growth in the use of Managed Kubernetes and domestic distributions

At the end of August 2024, Express 42 published DevOps Status Report in Russia. We studied his data and decided to tell about the most important moments in a series of articles. In first material collected basic information on the study participants and the tools currently used in the industry. For example, it shows that DevOps is increasingly of interest outside of IT companies and fintech, and the number of users of Russian server OS continues to grow.

In this article, we will also tell you how orchestration technologies are doing in Russian DevOps. We analyzed the survey results to understand which Kubernetes distributions are currently used and what criteria influence the choice of a containerization platform. You will also learn which orchestrators, image and secret storages are the most popular in the industry.

K8s and other orchestrators

Kubernetes remains the most popular container orchestrator, despite its user share declining from 58.3% to 54.4%:

The share of OpenShift and Rancher also decreased compared to last year — by 1 and 3.3 percentage points, respectively. The decrease in the share of Kubernetes and its distributions may be due to the spread of DevOps to new industries where they work with regular virtual machines and where Docker Swarm is sufficient.

By the way, Docker Swarm showed the greatest growth this year — from 14.7 to 18.6%. The report also notes an increase in the share of other orchestrators. For example, the share of Nomad users increased from 3.1 to 4.1%, Mesos — from 0.2 to 1.1%.

It is worth noting that Kubernetes ranks seventh (19.7%). in the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Among the “other tools” that developers use:

Top 10 Compilation, Build, and Testing Tools Frequently Used by Developers and Students Learning to Code in the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey — Top 10 tools for compiling, building and testing tools frequently used by developers and programming students, in 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey

Kubernetes Distributions

Since Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestrator, Express 42 specialists decided to analyze the distribution by distributions within its share. As a result, the results indicate a trend of switching to managed solutions and Russian distributions.

Thus, among K8s distributions, a significant share of preference is given to managed solutions – 64.6%. Compared to last year, it has grown by 8.4 percentage points:

Among the distributions, the following is popular: Deckhouse Kubernetes Platformwhose share increased from 9.9 to 12.3%. The share of other Russian distributions also increased – from 4.9 to 9.1%, while the percentage of other non-Russian distributions decreased by 16.8 percentage points – to 34.8%.

Here's what Konstantin Aksyonov, director of the Deckhouse platform development department, had to say about this:

“…In my opinion, this availability (availability of the platform approach and orchestrators – editor's note) is determined by the availability of high-quality ready-made solutions. That is why, for example, we are seeing an increase in the use of Managed Kubernetes from cloud providers. The resources and time saved on developing internal competencies in such a fairly complex technology as Kubernetes can be invested in solving truly important problems for business…”

Criteria for choosing an orchestrator

Of course, orchestrators' popularity is influenced by their capabilities. So respondents were asked which features or components of containerization platforms are especially important to them. The overall results:

When choosing an orchestration platform for an industry, the most important features are:

possibility of installation in a closed circuit – 49.1%;
centralized management of multiple clusters – 44.3%;
Possibility of downtime-free updates – 41%.

The least important functions were:

possibility of use in multi-tenancy mode – 7.9%;
built-in balancing of incoming traffic – 14.7%;
centralized storage and management of logs – 15.7%.

On this matter in the study Ilya Kochnev, Director of Operations and IT Infrastructure at Cooper, commented:

“Closed loop is a requirement for security and autonomy/independence, which has been a major trend in recent years. As orchestration platforms are now penetrating areas where previously only “traditional” solutions were used under strict regulatory requirements, we are seeing these requirements now being translated into orchestrators…”

Respondents were also asked what aspects are important to them when choosing a platform:

The most important aspects for respondents were:

solution cost – 51.5%;
operating costs – 48.9%;
complexity of implementation – 45.9%.

The least significant aspects were:

the presence of an ecosystem of related software – 11.9%;
a large catalog of compatible Russian software – 12.2%;
the ability to influence the platform development roadmap is 15%.

These data indicate that users are willing to choose platforms with ease of use at the expense of additional functionality and a large number of integrations.

Repositories of images and secrets

The most popular free image storage Docker Registry remains with 40.7%. Following it is the free version of Nexus with 37.5%:

At the same time, the paid version of Nexus is also indicated in the rating. And if you combine both versions, Nexus will take the leading position with 51.1%. Its popularity is explained by the support of many artifact formats and the ability to proxy packages and libraries for development.

The least popular solution was Quay, which may be due to Red Hat leaving the Russian market.

If we talk about secret storageshere the leader was HashiCorp Vault with 43.3%. It stands out due to the ability to install on any infrastructure, flexibility in configuration and tight integration with Kubernetes.

Conclusions

Compared to last year, orchestrators have become less popular. The share of respondents who do not use orchestrators increased from 18.7 to 24%. At the same time, the share of Kubernetes users decreased, and the share of Docker Swarm increased. This dynamic may be caused by the spread of DevOps to new industries.
The share of users of managed Kubernetes solutions increased from 56.2 to 64.6%, and the share of users of Russian distributions increased from 14.8 to 21.4%. We are seeing the beginning of a trend towards switching to managed solutions and domestic distributions.
The most important features of orchestrators for survey participants were the ability to install in a closed loop, centralized management of multiple clusters, and the ability to perform zero-downtime upgrades. Key factors in choosing an orchestration solution were its cost, operating costs, and implementation complexity.
Docker Registry and Nexus remain the leading image repositories due to their functionality and support for various artifact formats. And among secret storage, HashiCorp Vault confidently takes the first position due to its ease of use.

Download detailed report You can find out about the state of DevOps in Russia in 2024 on the research website. And in the last article of the series, we will tell you what we learned about internal infrastructure platforms: what percentage of companies have them, what is the main value of the platforms, and what difficulties respondents face in their development and advancement.