Cloud-native, or containerised, applications are now mainstream. As many as 82% of enterprises now have Kubernetes in production, according to the Cloud Native Computing Forum (CNCF). That is up from 66% in 2023. And a full 98% of organisations have at least some cloud-native applications, the industry body says.
But moving applications to cloud-native environments does not just mean creating new code. It also means adapting infrastructure. Compute, networking and data storage all need to work with container environments. By no means can all systems do this out of the box, especially when it comes to on-premise hardware.
At the same time, enterprise IT architects need to consider the requirements of legacy applications and virtual machines (VMs) that are not being updated. And enterprises will want to make the most efficient use of their storage hardware, regardless of their application environments.
Moving to containers means adapting a technology that was not designed for persistent storage to handle business-critical data.
