Containers Used on over Half of New Apps in Production

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Shippable, the Seattle-based producer of a continuous delivery platform for software developers, recently quizzed 300 coders in the U.S. and found that more than half of them (52 percent) are using Docker or other container technologies to deploy their new applications in production. Fourteen percent are using containers for development and testing purposes.

Indicating that 2016 is the year that containers cement their hold on the enterprise, a whopping 89 percent of respondents told the startup that they were very or somewhat likely to increase their use of the DevOps-enabling technology within the next 12 months.

Developers are turning to containers when speed is of the essence. Containers have helped a majority of developers (74 percent) ship new software at least 10 percent faster. Eight percent are enjoying a 50-percent boost.

Containers are clearly entering the mainstream. In March, after polling 1,800 technology professionals, Web server and application specialists NGINX discovered that two-thirds of organizations have fallen under the spell of Docker and other containerized application platforms. Among those, 20 percent are using containers for production workloads.

Shippable’s findings also indicate that containers and the cloud go hand-in-hand.

Thirty-one percent of respondents are running containers on public clouds. Private clouds are a close second with 30 percent. Hybrid clouds are the setup of choice for 17 percent of developers while 2 percent keep their containers in on-premises environments.

The big three public cloud providers (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) are running a tight race, suggesting that their efforts to attract developers are paying off. “Fifty-two percent of developers surveyed by Shippable said they’re running containerized applications on Google Compute Engine, while 49 percent are running on Microsoft Azure and 43 percent on Amazon Web Services,” wrote Matt Carter, vice president of Marketing at Shippable, in a blog post.

Among the holdouts, a lack of in-house skills was the top reason some developers are avoiding containers. Others cited concerns regarding container technology’s maturity, infrastructure incompatibilities and security. For some, return on investment (ROI) remains a big question mark.

Those barriers to adoption are not insurmountable, said Shippable’s CEO Avi Cavale. “Companies can help themselves by training internal software teams and partnering with vendors and service providers that have worked with container technology extensively,” he advised in a statement.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.