Cloud Computing / Container Adoption Continues to Pick Up Speed

Container Adoption Continues to Pick Up Speed

By Michael Vizard | Posted 2015-11-18

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Container Adoption Continues to Pick Up Speed

For solution providers, the rise of containers will affect everything from the number of servers firms need to the demand for tools to manage containers.
Container Technology

78% of respondents are using or planning to use Docker, 24% are opting for Linux containerization technology in the form of LXC and 16% said they are planning to use rkt as an alternative to Docker containers.
Containers Usage

86% are using containers for development and 64% for testing. Surprisingly, 40% report they are using containers in production environments.
Docker Deployment

The scope of container usage spans from one to 10 hosts (27%), to 11 to 50 hosts (29%), to more than 250 hosts (21%).
Where Containers Run

Nearly half (46%) said they plan to run containers on EC2 Amazon Linux, while 45% use or plan to use Ubuntu/Debian. Roughly a quarter selected CentOS and RedHat Enterprise Linux.
Container Adoption Rates

Among respondents who are not already using containers, more than 80% intend to adopt containers; 11% plan to adopt containers within the next three months and 35% plan to adopt them within the next six months.
Shifting to Docker in Production Environments

More than half (53%) said they intend to adopt containers in production within the next six to 12 months.
Need for Deployment Speed

85% said the main driver for moving to a containerized infrastructure is that containers make it faster and easier to deploy applications. More than six in 10 (62%) cited flexibility in deployment.
A Desire for Isolation

54% cited better isolation as another reason for choosing containers. Containers are designed to isolate processes by encapsulating dependencies. Each container runs on a shared host OS but is isolated from the OS and any other containers running on the same host OS.
Moving Toward Microservices

48% of the respondents indicated that a desire to move to a microservices architecture was a motivating factor in their decision to adopt containers.
The Cost Factor

30% said cost was a motivating factor in adopting containers. Containers help drive significant gains in IT infrastructure utilization.
Barriers to Adoption

56% said the biggest barrier to moving to a containerized infrastructure is the technology's maturity; 50% indicated that orchestration is a challenge when adopting containers, while 46% said monitoring and 40% said automation posed additional barriers to adoption.
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Enterprises' shift to containers is poised to accelerate rapidly, according a survey of 138 IT professionals conducted by O'Reilly Media on behalf of Ruxit, which provides application performance monitoring tools. Considered a lightweight alternative to traditional approaches to virtualization, most container adoption has been driven by the developer community's enthusiasm. Yet, as apps built using Docker containers move into production, IT operations teams are starting to see much higher utilization rates of IT infrastructure. Docker containers are by far the most widely deployed form of containers; 40 percent of those surveyed have already deployed a container app in a production environment. For solution providers, the rise of containers will affect everything from the number of servers organizations need to the demand for tools to manage thousands of containers that can be deployed easily. Although where all those containers will wind up running is less clear, the rise of containers as part of a shift toward modern microservices architectures in the enterprise might be the decade's most transformational technology.