Containers All Set To Surpass VMs In Application Platform Space

The technology is ready for primetime! A new survey of enterprises with cloud operations shows that a spike in usage of containers as the application development platform of choice.

In fact, they are all ready to eclipse virtual machines.

The 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration report reveals that the use of containers among cloud users surged from just 8% in 2016 to 45% this year. What’s more, of the 55% of the respondents that are not using containers, again an overwhelming 45% said they expect to make the move next year.

A further breakdown of the respondents that were not using the container technology showed 51% of them cited a lack of maturity for hesitance.

While some 27% were held back by the lack of management and deployment tools, and 24% were of the opinion that they did not yet know how to scale containers.

In terms of usage, the lean operating nature was what the surveyed users viewed as most central to their container usage. 62% cited faster spin up and down, 58% though that containers offered a lower perceived overhead than VMs, while nearly 47% were using them for their ease of management.

All this is setting the stage towards a future where containers will become the new dominant application platform to be managed, instead of virtual machines.

The Linux based Kubernetes was overwhelmingly chosen as the preferred container, with 64% stating their use of the platform. Docker Swarm came in at 36%, while Apache Mesos had numbers of 18% alongside its name.

No wonder, Amazon Web Services has been feeling a little heat from the Google pioneered Kubernetes.

Speaking of AWS, the survey also touched upon the cloud environments and DevOps models used by the market, two of the most key factors is use of containers. The Amazon cloud platform remained the overwhelming choice, but Microsoft had narrowed the gap between it and its Azure cloud.

At least, in terms of functionality.

The Google Cloud Platform had also moved into a credible position as an alternative to AWS and Azure, with the success of Kubernetes seemingly gravitating users towards it.

You can check out the full details of this survey from SDxCentral here at this link.