Research Objectives
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, organizations must be sufficiently agile and flexible to meet the evolving needs of their customers. However, many still rely on legacy applications that can struggle to handle the demands of modern-day business requirements. This can create significant challenges for IT departments that are tasked with maintaining business operations while transitioning to more modern approaches that drive their organizations forward. To overcome these challenges, organizations are increasingly turning to a “cloud-first” strategy for their digital transformation initiatives. This approach involves prioritizing cloud-based, developer-friendly solutions over traditional on-premises software and infrastructure, allowing organizations to leverage the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing to improve their operations, increase agility, and meet the needs of their customers more effectively.
To assess the landscape for cloud-native applications and methodologies, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 378 IT and DevOps/AppDev professionals in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, building, and managing application infrastructure in their organization. This study sought to answer the following:
- What percentage of production applications are currently based on a microservices cloud architecture today?
- Where are organizations deploying (or planning to deploy) cloud-native applications?
- What are the biggest challenges with cloud-native applications?
- How are microservices improving processes across the organization? What are the most impactful benefits?
- What are the biggest challenges or concerns with applications based on a microservices architecture?
- How many containers are supported within today’s environments? What is the preference for orchestration?
- What approaches are organizations employing to manage multi-cluster and multi-namespace deployments?
- What is driving the use of serverless functions?
- What types of tools and technologies are used to build and deliver cloud-native applications?
- What is the adoption status of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates?
- How do organizations distribute their development team’s time across tasks?
- How extensively are organizations using DevOps methodologies?
- What is the maturity level of organizations’ continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) initiatives?
- How extensively are organizations using GitOps approaches to automate application builds?
- How often do organizations typically deploy new code to production environments?
- What individuals or groups have the most influence on decisions around cloud-native applications?
- What are organizations’ perceptions around the effectiveness of their development teams?
- How confident are organizations in their development team’s ability to ship secure code at an efficient pace?
- How will spending on cloud-native technologies, services, and personnel change over the next 12-18 months?
- What actions will organizations take to optimize their cloud-native application development strategies?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
