IT decision-makers increasingly opt for cloud-native architectures

A quarter of IT decision-makers who took part in a recent study said they are building or evaluating cloud-native applications, says Cloud Foundry. A further 25% said they would evaluate cloud-native architectures within the next 12 months.

Just 13% said they are refactoring existing applications, according to the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s Global perception study of 601 IT decision-makers across China, Europe and the US.

The study found that organisations are opting for a mix of building new cloud-native applications and refactoring existing applications, compelling them to choose a bespoke combination of technologies for their specific needs.

Almost one-third of IT decision-makers said they are using, or plan to use, containers, and 25% plan to evaluate containers within the next 12 months.

Continuous integration and continuous development IT practices are being used or evaluated by 23% of the IT decision-makers, and 32% plan to evaluate continuous integration/continuous development in the next 12 months.

DevOps is also gaining acceptance, with 32% of IT decision-makers saying they are running or evaluating it.

According to Cloud Foundry, although DevOps and CI/CD are intertwined concepts, IT decision-makers see DevOps as culture change happening today, and CI/CD technology to support it as something they plan to incorporate within the next year.

The survey found that among the IT decision-makers using platform as a service (PaaS), 62% said the technology is saving their companies more than $100,000.

Commenting on the findings, Abby Kearns, executive director at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, said: “As IT decision-makers settle into their cloud journey, they are more broadly deploying a combination of available platforms, including PaaS, containers and serverless.”

Cloud Foundry said the survey showed that an increasing number of companies are developing new cloud-native applications, at the same time as PaaS is being broadly deployed by more companies than ever.

“In this multi-platform world, it should come as no surprise that, as they become more comfortable with these tools, IT decision-makers are searching for a suite of technologies to work together,” said Kearns. “They want technologies that integrate with their current solutions in order to address their needs today, but are flexible enough to address their needs in the future.”