How Containers Are Holding Water Amid Challenges

Containers

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%.