Cloud Foundry survey finds container adoption more challenging than expected
Containers are the rage these days, but the adoption rate of the technology among enterprise companies is slow. That is the conclusion of a new Cloud Foundry survey, which found no dramatic increase in the broad deployment of containers by companies over the last year.
IT professionals with at least two years of experience were questioned through an online panel during the survey. Respondents came from 18 different industries, including manufacturing, financial services and government.
“In the 2016 Container Report, we saw the excitement around containers and their potential —yet this excitement was constrained by the complex challenges of deploying, managing and orchestrating containers at scale,” said Abby Kearns, executive director of Cloud Foundry Foundation.
“In our follow-up one year later, we see the same steady growth in interest but actual adoption of containers has still failed to accelerate. We believe the gradual or even glacial adoption of containers in production reflects more on the central challenge we pointed to in the 2016 Container Report—the challenges of container management are real, and loom larger at scale.”
Last year, for example, Cloud Foundry’s 2016 IT survey of 771 respondents found the percentage of respondents using containers at their company increased by 22%. By contrast, the Cloud Foundry’s 2017 IT survey of 540 respondents found 25% of enterprise companies use containers in production, a slight 3% increase from the year before.
The report also found 53% of companies using containers were managing the technology with container services like AWS, EC2 or GCE, or a platform as a service (PaaS) such as IBM Bluemix or Microsoft Azure. Only 15% of respondents said they were using self-managed container orchestration tools. Within that group, 27% said they were using CoreOS Tectonic next to Hashicorp Nomad, Docker Swarm and Mesos at about 20% each. Surprisingly, none of the respondents said they were using Kubernetes on their own.
It should be noted, however, that Cloud Foundry did not calculate a margin of error in the survey. The precise representatives of the survey were unknown. Cloud Foundry said it did not create the survey to filter respondents from similar companies.
Although container adoption has stagnated, Cloud Foundry nevertheless predicts container adoption will increase in a year’s time. “As enterprises have begun to adopt containers, the discussion is shifting from “why containers” to “how containers.” This “how” conversation will drive larger scale adoption as organizations move forward,” the authors of the study concluded.
