The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem: 2015

Chapter 1. The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem: 2015

Introduction

Containers are one of the hottest topics in IT right now, but how are they actually being used? A survey conducted by O’Reilly Media in collaboration with Ruxit throughout May 2015 invited individuals from the O’Reilly community to share how their organizations currently use or plan to use containers. The results reveal that container technologies—and Docker in particular—are rapidly being adopted to make application deployment faster, easier, and more flexible.

The survey, which ran in the lead up to DockerCon 2015, aimed to discover how containers are being used and which container technologies and infrastructures are being adopted, as well as motivations and challenges associated with opting to use containers.

The 138 self-selected respondents came from a range of industries, including software, consulting, publishing and media, education, cloud services, hardware, retail, government, and others. They represent a spectrum of different sizes of companies or organizations, with about half of the respondents coming from organizations with fewer than 500 employees. Thirteen percent of responses are from individuals working at companies or organizations with over 10,000 employees.

Container Uptake Is High

The results reveal that the adoption of container technologies is high, with 65% of respondents ...