A global survey of 628 IT professionals shows that internal IT teams are increasingly struggling to manage cloud‑native applications running on Kubernetes clusters—creating new opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs).
Steady Kubernetes adoption puts pressure on IT teams
Conducted by Linux Foundation Research on behalf of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the survey reveals that 82 percent of respondents now run Kubernetes clusters in production. More than half (54 percent) rely primarily on containers in these environments, while another 35 percent use containers for a smaller subset of production applications.
Kubernetes adoption has taken more than a decade to reach this point, with most activity concentrated in larger organizations. Momentum has been steady, and the types of workloads moving to Kubernetes continue to expand. Notably, 66 percent of respondents are now hosting AI inference workloads on Kubernetes—23 percent hosting all, and 43 percent hosting some, of their inference workloads on clusters.
Challenges highlight need for MSP expertise
However, organizations still face meaningful barriers. Nearly half (47 percent) report cultural challenges when deploying containers in production environments. Other top hurdles include lack of training (36 percent), security concerns (36 percent), CI/CD issues (35 percent), monitoring limitations (35 percent), and complexity (34 percent). As a result, only 25 percent of respondents say they use cloud‑native technologies across their full application lifecycle, while 34 percent mostly use them.
These challenges represent a growing opportunity for MSPs with Kubernetes expertise. Internal IT teams need support managing cloud‑native applications running alongside legacy, monolithic workloads still dependent on virtual machines. As Kubernetes becomes more mainstream, responsibility is shifting from specialized DevOps engineers to general IT administrators—and, increasingly, to MSPs.
Each MSP must evaluate whether investing in Kubernetes skills will deliver sufficient ROI, but those capable of managing both Kubernetes clusters and traditional VM‑based workloads will hold a competitive edge.
The road ahead: A long-term hybrid reality
While small and mid‑sized businesses are unlikely to deploy Kubernetes at scale, adoption is rising steadily from the midmarket upward. Many organizations lack not only Kubernetes administration skills but also expertise across the broader ecosystem of tools and applications required for full‑stack operations.
Looking ahead, there may eventually be more modern workloads on Kubernetes than monolithic applications on virtual machines. However, that day is still far off. For the foreseeable future, IT environments will remain diverse—often increasingly so—creating ongoing demand for MSPs that can support both legacy and cloud‑native architectures.
Photo: ImageFlow / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.
