Kubernetes Benchmark Report 2023: Reliability, Security and Cost-Effectiveness

Research from software vendor Fairwinds points to a number of ongoing problems with Kubernetes. In the Kubernetes Benchmark Report 2023, the researchers pay attention to a number of core issues: reliability, security and cost-effectiveness. Unfortunately, the figures for 2022 are worse in some areas than the year before.

Understaffed DevOps Teams

The report, which is available for free, addresses a problem that will be familiar to many: DevOps teams are simply understaffed. For that reason, Fairwinds recommends deploying Kubernetes policies and guardrails that prevent container technology deployments from underperforming.
With Kubernetes clusters, the general advice is to set limits on the use of resources and the number of requests on workloads. This is easier said than done, because organizations are constantly scaling up and new applications are emerging. This innovation is apparently moving so fast that the study even sees a drastic drop in the application of these resource and request limits. Where in 2021 41 percent of organizations did this for 90 percent of their own applications, that percentage has dropped to 17 percent in 2022. In other words, as Kubernetes usage increases, visibility decreases. This leads to unnecessary and unclear costs, as applications often demand far too many hardware cycles undisturbed.

Liveness Probes and Other Issues

Another way to keep Kubernetes use efficient is to use so-called ‘liveness probes’. These probes monitor the health of an application and see if a Kubernetes container is running. Without these probes, a hang running a single container, so that hardware resources are once again consumed without end result. Here too, the researchers note that 2022 will have worse results than 2021: where 65 percent had not used liveness probes for more than 10 percent of the workloads, this is now 83 percent.
Other issues include missing deployment replicas, which occurs in a quarter of organizations. CPU limits are also not consistently enforced, while missing CPU requests allow one Kubernetes pod to hijack the resources that another pod wanted to use.

Good News

There is also good news to report: Kubernetes guardrails, for example, ensure faster resolution of problems. Misconfigurations are more likely to be caught than they cause problems. Fairwinds recommends using its own software in this area.
Kubernetes is a powerful tool for managing cloud-native applications, but it is not without its challenges. The Kubernetes Benchmark Report 2023 from Fairwinds highlights the need for DevOps teams to have visibility into their Kubernetes clusters in order to ensure reliability, security and cost-effectiveness. The report also recommends deploying Kubernetes policies and guardrails, using liveness probes, and setting limits on the use of resources and the number of requests on workloads. With the right tools and strategies, organizations can ensure their Kubernetes clusters are running efficiently and securely.