Since the dawn of the computer age, IT has been defined by the operating systems (MS-DOS, Unix, Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS) that quarterback them. Seventy-one percent of all organizations run databases and caches in Kubernetes, representing a 48% year-on-year increase. Together with messaging systems (36% growth), organizations were increasingly using databases and caches to persist application workload states. Kubernetes, which has been in general use for less than a decade, orchestrates and deploys containers with microservices to run workloads.
In 2022, auxiliary workloads outnumbered application workloads (63% vs. 37%) as organizations increasingly adopted advanced Kubernetes platform technologies such as security controls, service meshes, messaging systems, and observability tools.