Observing how cloud deployments are shaping native cloud system in China

The cloud adoption has surged during the COVID outbreak in China and the rest of the world. According to industry experts, this increasing use of cloud technology helped in sharing the information as well as storing data to sustain remote working. Further, cloud can help businesses gain momentum in the market sooner than ever. However, this is not the first time this nation transitioned to cloud platforms. In reality, Chinese brands are aware of the fact that there is a lot of tailwind to this technology. Though China is still in nucleus stage of cloud services, surveys show there is an impressive switch to cloud offerings being adopted by enterprises. For many years, enterprises' IT leaders have been pursuing cloud computing as a part of their broader digital transformation strategies. Recently published the Cloud Native Survey China 2019 offers deeper insights into the pace of cloud-native adoption in the Mandarin region. It also mentions how cloud is empowering companies and transforming development in this large and growing community.

CNCF conducted a survey of its community during September and October 2019 and received 1,337 responses. The key takeaways were 49% of respondents use containers in production, with another 32% planning to do so. This is a significant increase from November 2018, when only 20% used containers in production. Meanwhile, around 72% of respondents use Kubernetes in production, up from 40% in November 2018. Also, the use of public cloud dropped to 36% from 51% in November 2018, replaced by a new hybrid option with 39%.

Containers

Containers are a cloud feature that delivers a logical packaging mechanism in which applications can be abstracted from the environment they actually run. This decoupling allows container-based applications to be deployed quickly and consistently. They can also be deployed on public or private cloud infrastructure without using dedicated products from a cloud vendor. The modern forms of containers are expressed in application containerization such as Docker and system containerization, such as Linux Containers. Major cloud vendors have offered containers as service products, including Amazon Elastic Container Service, AWS Fargate, Microsoft Azure Container Instances (ACI), and more.

The survey indicates that while container usage in China lags behind global adoption, it is gaining momentum. Nearly half (49%) of respondents in the China survey use containers in production, with 32% in the planning stage. In terms of container challenges, complexity was named the top challenge by 53% of respondents, followed by security challenges garnering a 39% response. Lack of training and networking tied for third at 36%, while reliability and monitoring were chosen as deployment challenges by 35% of survey respondents.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the most popular automated container orchestration system. Designed by Google and is currently supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it is an open-source system that provides mechanisms to deploy, maintain, and scale containerized applications with automation. It also augments reliability and reducing the time and resources required to spend on DevOps. CNCF reports that Kubernetes is emerging as a common platform for container orchestration with a massive spike in adoption of 72% in production. At the same time, those evaluating Kubernetes decreased by 48% as they moved to production. Of those using Kubernetes, most respondents have 2-5 clusters in production (43%). This was the largest category last year and increased again by 8%.

According to CNCF's Cloud Native Landscape, there are more than 109 tools to manage containers, but 89% are using different forms of Kubernetes. This is an increase from 83% using different forms of Kubernetes in 2018. Top tools include Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Docker Desktop, Docker EE/CE and Azure Kubernetes Service.

Uptake

Though the Chinese cloud players aim for global domination, it is not going to be easy. The speed of development and deployment has accelerated in China owing to the combined power of cloud and containers, supported by Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). When it comes to checking codes in repositories, 35% check-in code multiple times a day. 43% percent check-in code a few times a week, and 16% check in a few times each month. Further, 21% of respondents claimed to be employing automatic release cycles, with 31% relying on manual processes, and the rest, 46%, were using a hybrid version. The CNCF survey also noticed a shift away from the public cloud, consolidation of private, and the emergence of hybrid cloud.