Author: Kolawole Samuel Adebayo

Kubernetes (also called K8s) remains the most in-demand container for developers. Originally developed by engineers at Google, K8s has achieved global fame as the go-to solution for hosting across on-premise, public, private, or hybrid clouds. Insights from Statista show the Kubernetes market share of the public cloud went from 16% in 2021 to 45% in 2022. Another report on the state of Kubernetes in 2022 by VMware revealed that the adoption of Kubernetes has skyrocketed among large enterprises with 1,000 employees or more— from 27% in 2018 to 48% in 2020.  

However, despite its rise in popularity, some challenges persist, disallowing DevOps teams from reaping the full benefits of building cloud-native applications with K8s. How do they walk the tightrope and deliver their best projects? Let’s take a quick trip together.

The post-COVID world has seen more organizations adopt remote and hybrid work, allowing employees the flexibility to work from anywhere (WFA). While the move to a remote-hybrid work model for business operations comes with several benefits — like reduced cost and employee retention — it has not been without some challenges. For one, the proliferation of remote-hybrid work also meant that more organizations began migrating their workloads to multi-cloud environments as teams sought to work effectively without interruptions. In fact, one article on Forbes notes that the cloud is the backbone of remote work.

But with more employees working remotely from different parts of the world and sensitive data moving across multi-cloud and hybrid IT architectures, companies are faced with several security risks. From unsecured Wi-Fi networks used by employees to weaker security controls, to cloud misconfigurations, and more, the WFA model has widened the attack surface more than ever before. To put this in a practical perspective, Fortinet’s most recent “Work-From-Anywhere Global Study” shows that over the past 2 to 3 years since COVID-19, “nearly two-thirds of companies have experienced a data breach due to their WFA-employee vulnerabilities.”