Container Trends – Bitnami User Survey 2017 (Part 2)

Survey Says: Kubernetes

Name the top 5 container orchestration solutions.

Top answer on the board: Kubernetes

The rise of Kubernetes as the leading container orchestration tool should come as no surprise. It’s the topic of the day with Amazon and Microsoft recently joining the CNCF. In a few short years, we’ve seen hundreds of companies join the ecosystem building or modifying solutions to support kubernetes (check out the recently updated CNCF Landscape) and we’ve even seen the early days of acquisitions beginning to happen. With all that is being said and written, it’s still good to back up a trend with some good old-fashioned data.

As promised (see Container Trend Part 1), in our second post covering our recent user survey we’re taking a look at container orchestration trends. In our last blog post, we showed the increase in interest, highlighting a more than 2x increase in production container usage from 2016 to 2017. As that increase in container usage was happening, what impact did that have on how containers were being managed? Of course, we’d expect some increase in usage of container orchestration to match that growth.

We asked our users “What Container Orchestration System(s) does your company use?” and the results were surprising in a few ways. First and foremost was the enormous growth of Kubernetes. And while Mesos usage doubled, it still pales in comparison to new entrant offerings like AWS Elastic Container Service and Azure Container Service. Docker Swarm showed significant growth over that period as well, perhaps due to Swarm being included in the Docker 1.12 release. The least surprising bit of data was the sharp decline in users with no container orchestration, which is supportive of the shift from dev/test to production.

Figure 1. Container Orchestration Adoption - 2016 vs 2017

Key Stats:

• 115% growth in businesses using Kubernetes
• 100% growth in Mesos
• AWS Container Service overtaking Docker Swarm in less than 1 year

Digging deeper into container orchestration, we wanted to understand the scenarios in which the various platforms are being used. Knowing there was such a huge shift to production environments in the past year and seeing the impact that had on orchestration adoption above, we wanted to understand if there was preference for one platform over another as users make that move. For the most part, platform selection for dev/test is aligned with production. Focusing specifically on 2017 in this data set, we can see that Kubernetes, AWS and Azure usage all increased a few percentage points over their general adoption numbers when users were focused on production usage, with the largest number of users selecting Kubernetes.

Figure 2 – Container Orchestration Adoption 2017 – Dev/Test vs. Production

Key stats:

• Kubernetes is platform choice for over 50% of existing production container deployments

If you are making a decision on where to invest as you build out a container strategy or you’re looking for tools that can help you manage your Kubernetes environment, you’ve come to the right place. Bitnami can get you started on your journey with pre-packaged container images from our vast catalog of ready-to-run applications and we’re actively developing a contributing to a number of leading edge kubernetes projects.

Stay tuned for more from our 2017 Bitnami user survey. Next time we’ll break down container orchestration a little further and look at mixed usage …we’re just getting started.

Container Trends – Bitnami User Survey 2017 (Part 1)

Each year Bitnami conducts a survey of our user base. This year, we’ve gathered quite a bit of data about orchestration, automation, application development, development environments, containers and of course some very specific data about the wants and needs of full-time developers. Over the course of the next few weeks, we plan to share some of the industry trend information that we’ve captured in a series of blog posts and infographics.

One of the key technologies that we’ve been tracking for the past few years has been containers. In this year’s survey, we were impressed by the growth in container interest and the rapid growth in production usage. The first evidence of the increased interest was that the number of developers who told us they were using containers grew more than 2x from 2016 to 2017. The second significant piece of information from our survey was the large shift to production usage, seeing only 27% of users with containers in production in 2016 grow to over 65% in 2017. This trend was also supported by a decline in users reporting that they are using containers only for dev/test use-cases with no intent to run in production.

This indicates not just a maturation among the early adopters of containers from 2016 but a growing user base that is rapidly adopting and moving from dev/test to production.

Figure 1. Container Usage Dev/Test-Only vs. Production - 2016 vs 2017 

• More than 2x increase in production container usage
• 50% decrease in dev/test-only usage YoY

Looking deeper into what “production” meant to our users and at what scale, our survey data showed that large scale production usage (defined as 50+ container host machines) grew more than 100% year over year while respondents with fewer than 50 container images grew more than 250% year over year.

Figure 2. Container Usage – Production Scale – 2016 vs 2017

We can clearly see that container usage is shifting from dev/test to production environments, and we’ve established that usage is starting to reach some critical mass at scale. Let’s look at where the usage is coming from. Breaking down our data and reviewing production container usage by company size shows us that it is well distributed regardless of the number of employees. Small companies of less than 50 employees make up the largest percentage of production usage, however mid-sized business (50-1,000 employees) and large businesses (1,000+ employees) are not that far behind in their usage of containers in production environments.

Figure 3. Container Usage by Company Size

The Bitnami User Survey clearly shows that container orchestration has moved rapidly from dev/test to real production in the last year and that rate of adoption is likely to accelerate further as the small-scale deployments scale up. Look for our next post in this series where we’ll review what tools are the most popular for container management and what platforms are being selected for container hosting.

To accelerate container usage in your company, be sure to check out Bitnami containers for the latest stable versions of your application stacks and development environments. If you are a Kubernetes user, be sure to visit kubeapps.com to discover and launch Kubernetes-ready apps.

Share Your Thoughts on the Future of Open Source

As open source has evolved into an influential movement and adoption has grown, there continues to be new sets of important questions that will shape its future. The survey, sponsored by Black Duck, North Bridge Venture Partners and Forrester Research and supported by BitNami and over 30 other organizations, drives broad industry discussion around key issues for new and established software-related organizations and the open source community.

Help shape the future of open source by taking this year’s survey!

Last year’s survey had 740 responses – the most robust response to date – and we aim to reach 1,000 in 2013. This year’s survey will close on March 28, 2013.

For the first time ever, the survey results will be revealed during a live webinar panel discussion on April 17th. The results will also be announced to the media and shared on Twitter from the @FutureofOSSaccount, using the #FutureOSS hashtag. 

Help Drive Open Source Adoption by Taking a Quick Survey

We have teamed up with Black Duck Software, North Bridge Venture Partners, 451 Research and over  20 other collaborating organizations to introduce the 2012 Future of Open Source Survey – the results to be revealed on May 21^st at Computerworld’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). 

This survey follows on the heels of a very successful five year survey that has sparked important discussions around open source adoption.  The survey is supported by working together to address broad industry initiatives that go beyond the scope of any one group.  Take the survey here to voice your opinion and hear leading ideas around:

·         Hot technologies - such as mobile and cloud - and geographic growth areas for OSS adoption

·         Why companies engage directly and strategically with OSS communities

·         Industry-specific trends such as the formation of super-communities - communities of communities - dominating the next phase of OSS adoption

·         Top up and coming open source companies and projects

The survey results will be available on May 21^st to all respondents and by following discussion on Twitter @FutureofOSS and #FutureOSS.  Past survey results are available for viewing on the Future of Open Source Forum.

As an added incentive, all survey respondents will receive 20% off their pass to OSBC! 

Survey About Cloud Adoption

BitNami, Cloud.com and Zenoss have co-sponsored a survey of over 500 IT professionals to determine the key IT objectives and inhibitors for cloud adoption. The results show an overwhelming amount of interest in cloud computing. Read more...