Containers Use in Production Workloads Ticks Up Slowly

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Docker and other container platforms have caught the attention of enterprise software development teams and IT departments, but relatively few are entrusting their production workloads to the technology.

According to the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s latest Global Perception Study, 25 percent of enterprises are using containers in production, a three percent increase compared to 2016. Forty-two percent of respondents said their organizations were currently evaluating container technologies.

In total, 67 percent of all enterprises have at least taken containers for a spin, a healthy 14 percent increase from 2016. The study’s findings are based on a survey of more than 540 enterprise developers.

Although interest in containers is high among enterprise development teams, that zeal is quickly tempered by the challenges they face while attempting to deploy and manage containers at scale, according to the report. Fortunately, some pioneering organizations are already helping the industry devise new ground rules.

“New technologies, especially those that will become mission critical enterprise technologies, go through a period of hype and excitement during the early phases of their adoption,” said Chip Childers CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. “That hype cycle is what allows early adopters to build the experience necessary for the industry to create the right models for use and management by the broader industry.”

Today’s businesses have those trailblazers to thank for the agile DevOps and workload portability benefits containers will soon bestow on them.

“We just now reaching the point in the adoption cycle for containers where the best practices for use and management, along with the accompanying frameworks and platforms, are making their way into the larger enterprise technology market,” continued Childers.

A slight majority of businesses using containers (53 percent) employ a container service like Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or the Google Compute Engine (GCE), or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings managed by cloud providers to manage their containers.

Fifteen percent used self-managed container orchestration tools, stated the report. Among those, CoreOS Tectonic, a commercial distribution of Kubernetes, placed first (27 percent), followed by Hashicorp Nomad, Docker Swarm and Mesos (20 percent each).

Meanwhile, Kubernetes adoption is on the rise.

Based on the survey and other metrics collected by firm, interest in the open-source container orchestration technology has risen a whopping 200 percent, followed by Docker Storm at 66 percent as Mesos demand remained flat.

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