How Containers Are Holding Water Amid Challenges

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.