JFrog Report Surfaces Container Adoption Surge
JFrog this week published a report that suggests application environments are evolving as more organizations embrace containers and memory-safe programming languages like Rust to build and deploy applications.
The report is based on an analysis of how over 7,000 organizations use the JFrog platforms to manage DevOps workflows. The report finds that packages built using Docker containers are now the most widely used, with more than 1.3 million repositories, a 10% growth year-over-year. There are also more than 244,000 repositories housing Helm charts that are used to provision Kubernetes clusters.
At the same time, the number of Cargo packages used for artifacts created in Rust has reached 4,205, a 67% growth year-over-year. However, more than 90% of organizations also maintain a Maven repository to index artifacts created using Java, JavaScript, Python and C and C++.
Finally, the report notes that there are now more than 23,000 instances of Conan, a package manager for C/C++ code.
Stephen Chin, vice president of developer relations for JFrog, says there is generally a high correlation between organizations that build and deploy applications at the network edge and that embrace containers and programming languages like Rust and C++. One of the reasons so many organizations have embraced microservices is that it provides a better way to isolate the management of software written in different programming languages, notes Chin.
Overall, the report finds, on average, organizations are using seven package types with more than 100,000 artifacts, with 28% of organizations now storing more than 5PB of artifacts in their repositories.
Less clear is the degree to which DevOps are struggling under the weight of all the code written in multiple programming languages. Many organizations that embraced DevOps early are now finding the platforms they deployed have become challenging to manage and maintain. As application environments become more complex, the need to modernize DevOps workflows is becoming more apparent.
In the meantime, IT organizations should expect to see the number of containers being created, deployed and replaced within application environments continue to increase steadily. Not every container will find its way onto a Kubernetes cluster, but as an artifact that makes it simpler to distribute software, it is clear containers are now being pervasive. That doesn’t necessarily mean that legacy applications are being retired; instead, the total amount of software being deployed only seems to be increasing.
Ultimately, organizations must come to terms with the technical debt that software creates. Technical debt is a necessary evil simply because organizations often need to cut corners. That results in known bugs that go unfixed so an application can be delivered on time. Application code is often not as thoroughly tested as it should be. In some cases, it turns out that what was intended to be a minimum viable product doesn’t scale all that well. Quick fixes needed to improve performance are also frequently undocumented. Containers may make it easier to rip and replace code, but they also make it a lot easier to deploy more software than ever.
