5 Takes from 5 Years of Publishing

Every week we analyze data to better understand the complexities of at scale development, deployment and management. To celebrate The New Stack's five-year annivesary this week, we are re-sharing the datasets used in five of our ebooks. Here are a few takeaways that were shared with our readers:

Jul 18th, 2019 10:09am by Lawrence E Hecht

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Every week we analyze data to better understand the complexities of at scale development, deployment and management. To celebrate The New Stack’s five-year anniversary this week, we are re-sharing the datasets (select File > Download as) used in five of our ebooks. Here are a few takeaways that were shared with our readers:

Use Number of Companies to Measure Open Source Health: Researchers had already determined that a high concentration of contributions from just a few individuals or a few companies indicates a lower likelihood of a project’s long-term success. We identified a new variable inspired by Docker — the Whale Factor — to describe how many contributors come from just a few companies. At the time of the analysis, 58% of contributions to Docker came from Docker, Inc., and the corporation employed only 9% of the actual people that had contributed to the project. We believe that projects with more stakeholders (companies) are more likely to be sustainable. (see Chapter Page 52 of “Applications and Microservices with Docker & Containers”)
Kubernetes by a Mile: In early 2016 Kubernetes was the orchestration tool most often mentioned in the plans of 309 survey respondents. The study also found that 58% believed it to be extremely important for container orchestrator tooling to have integrated tooling for both developers and IT operations.
Early Days for Commercial Kubernetes: “The State of the Kubernetes Ecosystem” user survey found that only 45% Kubernetes users had a solution that came at least in part from a vendor. It would be a year or more before managed Kubernetes services would get considerable traction.
Focus on Kubernetes in China: Using data from Cloud Native Computing Foundation surveys, we found that Chinese respondents were twice as likely to say that reliability is or will be a challenge for deploying container. A year and a half later, and 21% of Kubernetes-certified service providers are based in China.
AWS Lambda Not the Only Show in Town: In 2018 we found that while AWS Lambda was the most used FaaS platform, offerings from other cloud providers were likely to gain traction. Learn more about the 608-participant survey by reading our “Guide to Serverless Technologies.”

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack.

Lawrence has generated actionable insights and reports about enterprise IT B2B markets and technology policy issues for almost 25 years. He regularly works with clients to develop and analyze studies about open source ecosystems. In addition to his consulting work,...