From my post introducing SIG Apps on the Kubernetes Blog

As Kubernetes took off, so did the need for tools, best practices, and discussions around building and operating cloud native applications. To fill that need the Kubernetes SIG Apps came into existence.

It’s not enough to have a platform that works well. We need focus on the experience of users of that platform. This is why I think SIG Apps is so important. It provides a place to focus on improving the experience and focusing on the needs of those beyond operators of Kubernetes itself.

There were some insights and not surprising confirmations in the survey of those operating applications in Kubernetes:

From the survey results we’ve learned a number of things including:

• That 81% of respondents want some form of autoscaling
• To store secret information 47% of respondents use built-in secrets. At reset these are not currently encrypted. (If you want to help add encryption there is an issue for that.)
• The most responded questions had to do with 3rd party tools and debugging
• For 3rd party tools to manage applications there were no clear winners. There are a wide variety of practices
• An overall complaint about a lack of useful documentation. (Help contribute to the docs here.)
• There’s a lot of data. Many of the responses were optional so we were surprised that 935 of all questions across all candidates were filled in. If you want to look at the data yourself it’s available online.

While we learned a lot from having all free form text fields on the survey it was also a reminder that they don’t scale and it’s hard to share the meaningful information found in them.

If you are interested in applications running in Kubernetes please come join us in SIG Apps.