2020‑2021 Survey on Cloud‑Native Technology Adoption in Traditional Industries

In 2020, cloud‑native technology moved from a commercial breakthrough to a new normal, accelerating digital transformation across traditional industries, especially under the pressure of the pandemic.

The Cloud‑Native Technology Practice Alliance (CNBPA), together with Lingqu Cloud and the Cloud‑Native Community, launched the third‑phase (2020‑2021) survey on cloud‑native adoption in traditional sectors, receiving 783 valid questionnaires from finance, manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, telecom and government enterprises of various sizes.

Key findings include:

Use of cloud‑native technologies (containers, DevOps, micro‑services) in production environments has doubled compared with the previous year.

Kubernetes is now the core of all infrastructure‑related software.

Service Mesh usage surged to 40.4%, potentially overtaking Spring Cloud as the most popular micro‑service framework.

Service Mesh, serverless (FaaS) and edge computing are the three emerging directions most concerned by enterprises.

IT scale grew despite the pandemic: enterprises with over 1,000 servers rose to 24% (twice the 2019 level), and 52% now have R&D teams larger than 100 people. IT budgets showed steady growth, with over 60% of companies increasing spending.

Adoption of cloud‑native practices is evident across the stack: 34.89% of respondents run core business workloads on cloud‑native platforms; 72.7% use Kubernetes for container orchestration; 62.3% have DevOps pipelines built on containers; and more than half of the surveyed firms are considering or have already migrated to cloud‑native databases.

Enterprises are increasingly favoring third‑party cloud‑native platforms over self‑built solutions, focusing internal resources on application development. Multi‑cloud and hybrid‑cloud deployments are also gaining traction, with 31.7% already using such models and 48.9% planning to adopt them.

Overall, the survey demonstrates that traditional industry enterprises are fully embracing cloud‑native technologies across infrastructure, application architecture, development processes and data services, accelerating their journey to the cloud.