Exploring Container Technology and Container Orchestration
Today it is safe to say that containers and container orchestration have left the hype phase and are now a mainstream cloud-native technology. The container growth trends are compelling:
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According to a survey of 600+ IT decision-makers, conducted in mid-July 2018 by ClearPath Strategies for the Cloud Foundry Foundation, 30% of enterprises have already deployed containers and 42% are in the evaluation stage.
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From a Sysdig report published in May 2018, we learn that the median number of containers per server now stands at 15, up 50% over the previous year.
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Containers are not only being experimented with in dev/test environments. A Portworx survey of more than 500 IT professionals revealed that in 2018, 83% of the enterprises running containers were using them in production, vs. 67% in 2017.
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Diamanti’s 2018 Container Adoption Benchmark Survey clearly shows that container use cases are becoming far more diverse, including new cloud-native applications (~55%), lightweight stateless apps (~39%), modernizing legacy apps (~31%), and databases (~30%).
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Last but not least, 451 Research reports that revenues from container technologies in 2018 were $1.53 billion, which is a little more than three times the revenues in 2015. By 2020, container technology revenues are expected to grow by another 75%, reaching $2.7 billion.
What is a Container?
But what is a container, exactly? A container is a resource-isolated software object that packages all the code, configurations, and dependencies needed to execute and run an application on any Linux platform, regardless of the environment (on-premises, public or private cloud, or even bare metal). Because multiple containers can share a single operating system (OS), they are significantly more lightweight than virtual machines (VMs). Container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes, automatically launch clusters of containers and manage their entire lifecycle, making it easier to deploy containers at scale.
Download this white paper and explore what is driving the growth of containers, as well as the opportunities and challenges of a specific container use case: Postgres databases.