Navigating the Complexities of the Cloud-Native World: A Study of Developer Perspectives

The cloud-native ecosystem has witnessed remarkable growth in recent years, resulting in a multitude of new frameworks tailored to address the changing needs of developers and operators. This expansion has brought forth a myriad of challenges, including complexity, security, adoption barriers, and developer experience. Gaining insight into developer perspectives is crucial for unlocking the full potential of cloud-native technologies and optimizing the various components of a cloud-native deployment. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive analysis of the challenges and opportunities within the cloud-native deployments, drawing from multiple surveys involving over 1000 participants. We have devised vital research questions to guide our analysis, addressing developers’ concerns regarding containerization, preferred workloads for autoscaling scenarios, workload isolation methods, challenges faced when integrating observability tools, and preferences, use cases, and obstacles encountered when adopting WebAssembly (WASM) in the cloud-native ecosystem. Our findings strive to bridge the knowledge gap between the research community and the industry, fostering future research directions in the dynamic and constantly evolving cloud-native domain.