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Cloud Native App Platforms: New Research Shows Struggles and Hope
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Cloud Native Ecosystem / Platform Engineering

Cloud Native App Platforms: New Research Shows Struggles and Hope

New Tanzu research underscores the challenges of harnessing value from custom app platforms and implications for platform engineering teams.
Jun 5th, 2024 9:00am by Camille Crowell-Lee and Rita Manachi
👁 Featued image for: Cloud Native App Platforms: New Research Shows Struggles and Hope
Featured image by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images.
VMware Tanzu sponsored this post.

As enterprise IT evolves, cloud native application platforms are becoming essential. The debate has shifted from questioning their future to deciding how swiftly organizations can harness their potential.

The Tanzu Division of Broadcom has published its annual State of Kubernetes report providing insights on Kubernetes adoption and usage over the last four years. In recognition of evolving market trends, this year, we broadened our research scope to encompass more of the cloud native ecosystem and the use cases it supports. The survey’s focus in 2024 is how enterprises are leveraging cloud native application platforms to drive business value.

What follows is a sneak peek of some of the key insights from Broadcom’s upcoming 2024 State of Cloud Native App Platform research, due to be published later this month.

The State of Cloud Native App Platforms: Key Findings

Custom-Built Conundrum

One of the most interesting insights from this year’s research involves the continuing challenges with custom-built platforms. While 61% of respondents indicated that at least one of their platforms is custom-built, the journey from concept to implementation is far from smooth. Alarmingly, 41% of these organizations took more than a year to develop a minimum viable product (MVP).

👁 Building a custom platform takes 41% of organizations more than a year

Even then, the path to value remains elusive; six months post-MVP, 64% of these platforms support 100 apps or fewer, indicating prolonged time-to-value cycles. This sluggish progress can significantly impact an organization’s competitiveness and bottom line. Even enterprises with sophisticated skills are finding it challenging to bring their applications to market efficiently. The result? Missed opportunities and strained resources.

👁 64% of respondents are running fewer than 100 apps on their custom platform after 6 months. This illustrates the difficulty of achieving scale.

Struggles in Realizing Value

The research highlights a pivotal issue: Organizations are grappling with the challenge of extracting value from their intricate, custom-built app platforms. A staggering 72% of respondents indicated they are utilizing multiple types of app platforms, ranging from home-grown solutions to turnkey managed services. This diversity in platform type is indicative of a maturing market, yet it also underscores a critical pain point — organizations are creating complexity in their route to market. In their effort to create flexibility, they have unintentionally introduced a consequence: variability, which leads to increased complexity and reduced speed.

👁 72% of respondents are utilizing two or more platform types. 19% are using 4+, 27% are using 3, 26% are using 2, and 28% are using 1.

Implications for Platform Engineering Teams

These findings underscore a critical need for platform engineering teams to reassess their strategies.

Embrace Repeatable Patterns

Given the widespread use of multiple platform types, it is essential to adopt approaches that increase predictability and can leverage the strengths of both custom-built and curated platforms. This strategy can help balance innovation with operational efficiency to avoid reinventing the wheel every time you push apps.

Accelerate MVP Development

To shorten the development cycle for MVPs, consider curated solutions alongside turnkey solutions so that you can get to MVP more quickly. Delivering delightful customer experiences more quickly will lead to future investment, scalability and innovation.

Focus on Value Delivery

Post-MVP, the key focus should be on accelerating the deployment and time-to-application changes to improve market responsiveness. Streamlining processes, enhancing developer experience and ensuring seamless integration can significantly reduce the time it takes to derive value from your platforms.

Invest in Continuous Learning

The rapidly evolving nature of cloud native technologies necessitates a commitment to ongoing education and skill development. Encourage your team to stay updated with the latest trends, tools and best practices through continuous learning and industry collaboration.

On the Path to Predictability

As the landscape of cloud native applications continues to evolve, one thing has become abundantly clear: The journey to harnessing full value from custom-built app platforms remains fraught with complexities and challenges. This year, we decided to broaden the aperture of our research to gain broader and deeper insights and actionable recommendations to help organizations understand the challenges and opportunities to thrive in the ever-evolving cloud native landscape.

Sign up to be notified when the full release of the 2024 State of Cloud Native App Platform Ebook is available from the Tanzu Division of Broadcom.

Trusted by enterprises and loved by developers, VMware Tanzu is built for platform and data teams who want to accelerate agentic software delivery and AI-ready data. Tanzu provides a pre-engineered, agentic app platform and an AI-ready data intelligence platform that helps enterprises build, run, manage and safeguard agents, their integrations and data so you can capitalize on AI at scale. 
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Camille Crowell-Lee is a solutions marketing leader who focuses on VMware Tanzu by Broadcom. She has been in technology marketing for over 17 years where she has built strategic marketing initiatives for hyperscale cloud providers and for ISVs, including containerization...
Read more from Camille Crowell-Lee
Rita Manachi is a marketing and communications pro with decades of experience in high tech. She is a marketing manager at VMware Tanzu.
Read more from Rita Manachi
VMware Tanzu sponsored this post.
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