Survey: The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem 2015

Containers continue to revolutionize app development and deployment and drive adoption of microservices. As organizations scramble to embrace container technologies there are also hurdles to overcome and issues to resolve. Ruxit teamed up with O’Reilly Media to conduct a survey and produce The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem 2015 report to gain insight into adoption, use, and challenges of container technologies—with a specific focus on Docker.

To gather data for the study Ruxit commissioned O’Reilly Media to survey members of its community to learn more about how they use or plan to use containers. The report is based on a rather small sampling of only 138 responses, but the respondents represent a broad range of perspectives including software, consulting, publishing and media, education, cloud services, retail, and government. Thirteen percent of the respondents were from organizations with more than 10,000 employees, but about half were from companies with fewer than 500 employees.

The report covers some of the impressive stats for Docker—pointing out that since its launch in March of 2013 more than 800 million containers have been pulled from the public Docker Hub. The public Docker Hub is also only one facet of Docker containers so that doesn’t even tell the whole story.

Here are some of the key findings from The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem 2015 report:

  • More than 93 percent of respondents are already using or plan to use containers for development, testing, or production.
  • The vast majority (78 percent) are opting for Docker.
  • Fast and easy deployment is the most important reason for using Docker (85 percent).
  • Within the next 6-12 months, over half (53 percent) of all respondents plan to adopt containers in production.
  • Nearly half (46 percent) see performance monitoring as a key challenge in the production environment.
  • Reliable and production-ready solutions are required for orchestration (56 percent), performance monitoring (46 percent) and automation (40 percent) because containerized environments are extraordinarily dynamic, making them uniquely challenging to monitor and manage in terms of performance.

A blog post from Ruxit explains, “One of the big reasons for adopting containerization is that it allows you to migrate from clunky monolithic application architectures to lightweight, flexible microservices. Docker is perfect for encapsulating, shipping, and running small, scalable microservices across multiple hosts.”

Ruxit is in the business of monitoring dynamic, complex Docker container environments so it makes sense that one of the primary takeaways of the report is that effective monitoring is a crucial element of container success. The Ruxit post points out that the information required to determine when and how to trigger scaling is available through real-time application monitoring, and the role that monitoring tools play in the microservices feedback loop. “Having this high-quality performance data is key to determining the impact that adding and removing containers has to the response times and performance of each service.”

You can download the complete The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem 2015 report from Ruxit by clicking here.

Tony Bradley

I have a passion for technology and gadgets--with a focus on Microsoft and security--and a desire to help others understand how technology can affect or improve their lives. I also love spending time with my wife, 7 kids, 2 dogs, 4 cats, 3 rabbits, 2 ferrets, pot-bellied pig and sulcata tortoise, and I like to think I enjoy reading and golf even though I never find time for either. You can contact me directly at [email protected]. For more from me, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

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