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2022 in Containerization Will Be About the Dev Experience and Reducing Kubernetes Bills

By Stacy Tumarkin, Head of Operations at Kubecost

Don't expect Kubernetes growth to slow down at all in 2022. However, what will change for enterprises is an evolving approach to Kubernetes strategy across several fronts.

Here are three Kubernetes trends to pay attention to in the coming year:

1) The developer experience around Kubernetes becomes a focal point - and a competitive differentiator.

While the rush to Kubernetes will continue, adoption rates may be hampered by the increasingly-challenging complexity of operating it. This reality ties into the increasing challenge of hiring the relatively rare talent capable of managing these environments effectively. It's already an employees' job market, and 2022 will likely tighten the screws on the market even more for enterprises. Staffing will require organizations to win over devs and engineers with more than the table stakes of a competitive salary and benefits package. What we'll see in 2022 are more enterprises being purposeful about the developer experience around Kubernetes operation and management that they can offer prospective team members, and ideally be able to differentiate as destinations where top talent wants to come to work.

To offer experiences that can ease and automate some of the complexity around Kubernetes, we're likely to see a 2022 uptick in enterprises building or adopting their own internal developer platforms (IDPs). Relatedly, I expect organizations to increasingly implement more robust and capable governance to assist development teams managing Kubernetes resources across environments, whether on-prem or in the cloud. Enterprises pursuing these measures to improve their developer experiences will more easily and rapidly scale their Kubernetes environments in 2022, amounting to a decisive advantage.

2) Enterprises turn attention to reining in Kubernetes costs.

In their initial rush to stand up Kubernetes environments and realize the benefits of more modernized application development, many organizations allowed costs to slide to the back burner. With these environments maturing (and in most cases expanding), expect more enterprises in 2022 to recognize that inefficient Kubernetes spending is unsustainable at scale. While modern toolsets have exacerbated this issue by making it simple to overprovision Kubernetes resources and offering limited visibility into that spending, expect 2022 strategies to begin taking a magnifying glass to their Kubernetes costs. In the coming year, look for enterprises to introduce real-time Kubernetes cost visibility and management capabilities, and enforce cost efficiency across teams through showback, chargeback, and hybrid strategies.

3) Enterprises will increasingly leverage spot instances to reduce Kubernetes costs.

The major cloud providers sell their excess compute capacity as spot instances, at deep discounts up to 90 percent. But it comes with a wrinkle: the resources can become unavailable on short notice. Kubernetes is highly-capable of moving workloads quickly as resources change, making it a strong match for taking advantage of spot instances. However, the work of selecting the workloads that can safely run on spot instances, and choosing the right nodes to use in the right number, is challengingly complex. In 2022, I think we'll see enterprises get more strategic and purposeful with utilizing spot instances, unlocking considerable savings for their organizations.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stacy Tumarkin is Head of Operations at Kubecost, a tool delivering Kubernetes cost monitoring and management at scale. She has helped scale operations in leadership roles at multiple high-growth companies, and holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.