Cloud Native App Platforms: New Research Shows Struggles and Hope
As enterprise IT evolves, cloud native application platforms are becoming essential. The debate has shifted from questioning their future to deciding how swiftly organizations can harness their potential.
The Tanzu Division of Broadcom has published its annual State of Kubernetes report providing insights on Kubernetes adoption and usage over the last four years. In recognition of evolving market trends, this year, we broadened our research scope to encompass more of the cloud native ecosystem and the use cases it supports. The survey’s focus in 2024 is how enterprises are leveraging cloud native application platforms to drive business value.
What follows is a sneak peek of some of the key insights from Broadcom’s upcoming 2024 State of Cloud Native App Platform research, due to be published later this month.
The State of Cloud Native App Platforms: Key Findings
Custom-Built Conundrum
One of the most interesting insights from this year’s research involves the continuing challenges with custom-built platforms. While 61% of respondents indicated that at least one of their platforms is custom-built, the journey from concept to implementation is far from smooth. Alarmingly, 41% of these organizations took more than a year to develop a minimum viable product (MVP).
Even then, the path to value remains elusive; six months post-MVP, 64% of these platforms support 100 apps or fewer, indicating prolonged time-to-value cycles. This sluggish progress can significantly impact an organization’s competitiveness and bottom line. Even enterprises with sophisticated skills are finding it challenging to bring their applications to market efficiently. The result? Missed opportunities and strained resources.
Struggles in Realizing Value
The research highlights a pivotal issue: Organizations are grappling with the challenge of extracting value from their intricate, custom-built app platforms. A staggering 72% of respondents indicated they are utilizing multiple types of app platforms, ranging from home-grown solutions to turnkey managed services. This diversity in platform type is indicative of a maturing market, yet it also underscores a critical pain point — organizations are creating complexity in their route to market. In their effort to create flexibility, they have unintentionally introduced a consequence: variability, which leads to increased complexity and reduced speed.
Implications for Platform Engineering Teams
These findings underscore a critical need for platform engineering teams to reassess their strategies.
Embrace Repeatable Patterns
Given the widespread use of multiple platform types, it is essential to adopt approaches that increase predictability and can leverage the strengths of both custom-built and curated platforms. This strategy can help balance innovation with operational efficiency to avoid reinventing the wheel every time you push apps.
Accelerate MVP Development
To shorten the development cycle for MVPs, consider curated solutions alongside turnkey solutions so that you can get to MVP more quickly. Delivering delightful customer experiences more quickly will lead to future investment, scalability and innovation.
Focus on Value Delivery
Post-MVP, the key focus should be on accelerating the deployment and time-to-application changes to improve market responsiveness. Streamlining processes, enhancing developer experience and ensuring seamless integration can significantly reduce the time it takes to derive value from your platforms.
Invest in Continuous Learning
The rapidly evolving nature of cloud native technologies necessitates a commitment to ongoing education and skill development. Encourage your team to stay updated with the latest trends, tools and best practices through continuous learning and industry collaboration.
On the Path to Predictability
As the landscape of cloud native applications continues to evolve, one thing has become abundantly clear: The journey to harnessing full value from custom-built app platforms remains fraught with complexities and challenges. This year, we decided to broaden the aperture of our research to gain broader and deeper insights and actionable recommendations to help organizations understand the challenges and opportunities to thrive in the ever-evolving cloud native landscape.
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