How Containers Are Holding Water Amid Challenges
-
How Containers Are Holding Water Amid Challenges
The container market has garnered much excitement. Here's a look at how and why containers are used and the challenges and opportunities that have emerged. -
Actual Use of Containers
Just over one-fifth (22%) are currently using containers, 36% say they are evaluating them and 34% are not currently using them. -
How Containers Are Being Employed
Just over half (54%) said they are using containers for app development, 42% as a lightweight method for sharing resources, 36% for a versioned runtime environment, 33% for an OS environment and 30% for replacing virtual machines. -
Top Container Benefits
Security and isolation top the list of container benefits, at 42%, followed by easier version control (37%), an ability to have a consistent app development and production environment (36%), and an overall lighter-weight footprint (35%). -
Biggest Container Deployment Concerns
Too complex to integrate (45%) is cited most often as the biggest concern, followed by not enough skills (35%), and too much time to manage and not enough cost reduction (both tied at 25%). -
Biggest Tactical Container Challenges
50% cited container management as the biggest tactical container challenge, followed by monitoring (38%), persistent storage (36%) and security (30%). -
Container Reality vs. Perception
92% of organizations that have deployed containers say they are a component of a PaaS environment or cloud platform, while 84% said managing containers without a provider would be a challenge. Deploying containers at scale and container complexity were cited as issues by 82% and 80%, respectively. -
Where the Containers Are
Almost a third (32%) said they have deployed containers on a PaaS environment (such as Bluemix); a managed container service (such as EC2), at 21%; on-premise deployments using their own tools, at 16%; on-premise deployments using container orchestration tools (such as Swarm), at 15%; and an on-premise PaaS, such as Cloud Foundry, at 13%. -
The Container Orchestration War
Among the 15% using "self-managed orchestration tools," CoreOS Tectonic, a commercial distribution of Kubernetes and CoreOS, leads with 27%, followed closely by Hashicorp's Nomad (25%) and Docker Swarm (22%). Trailing the top three are Apache Mesos (19%), Mesosphere DCOS (6%) and Tutum (1%). -
Top Container Management Platforms
Cloud Foundry tops the list, at 42%, followed by Amazon Web Services, at 32%, and Microsoft Azure, at 31%.
What Partners Need to Know About HP, Inc. 
MSPs Face Big Cybersecurity Talent Gap 
Why Tech Companies Are Eager to Invest in 5G 
The Problem With Partner Referral Programs 
Microsoft Taps Channel for Digital Business 
New Technologies Will Fuel Channel Opportunities 
Channel's Transition to the Cloud Requires More Time 
Microsoft's Cloud Channel Begins to Mature 
Defining MSPs' Goals, Challenges and Tools 
Why Metrics Matter to the Channel Despite a lot of excitement about all things relating to containers, in particular, and microservices, in general, it's still early days when it comes to using the technology in production environments. Most of those containers are being deployed on a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or external cloud service, according to the findings of a survey of 374 IT pros conducted by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a consortium that oversees the development of the open-source PaaS environments. Just under one-fourth said they are already employing containers. However, challenges with managing containers, particularly at scale, mean that few organizations today are running containers on-premise. That may change as developers continue to force the issue from an IT operations perspective and container orchestration and management frameworks mature. However, for now, solution providers across the channel need to look at the direction developers are taking the IT industry toward. While containers continue to find mainstream adoption, it still doesn't look like any other part of the IT environment is going to be supplanted by containers any time soon. Here's a look at key takeaways from the study.