Container use has more than doubled in the past 6 months, finds survey

Study by Densify finds a rise in multi-cloud and container strategies

A global survey of 439 enterprise IT professionals by cloud resource management software company Densify in May found that hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are increasingly prevalent. Sixty-six per cent of respondents ran more than one cloud infrastructure service, the most popular public cloud provider being AWS, followed by Microsoft Azure and then Google Cloud Platform. Just ahead of Google, 38 per cent using it, was VMware on-premises virtualisation.

Public cloud adoption continues to increase, and perhaps as a consequence of the rapid proliferation of cloud options, 40 per cent of respondents described themselves as being 'not up to speed' with the latest developments. This situation is likely to become exacerbated, particularly in view of rapid changes in the way in which applications are architected and deployed, with traditional VMs beginning to be displaced by containers as the platform of choice.

Indeed, containers are growing at an astonishing rate: the survey found a doubling of container use over the last six months with 44 percent using them in production as opposed to 19 per cent last November.

Organisations using containers typically turn to managed Kubernetes services to orchestrate deployments, with Amazon EKS being the most popular. While infrastructure automation using AWS CloudFormation, Hashicorp Terraform, Azure Resource Manager and similar infrastructure-as-code solutions was being undertaken by the majority, a significant 45 per cent had not yet adopted such automated management tools.

Cloud was once sold to enterprises as a money saving option, and while it can be good for the bottom line this is by no means guaranteed, particularly as visibility into exactly which resources are being consumed can be tricky in such a complex environment; and for operations staff cost is not always front of mind. Indeed, 45 per cent of respondents said they overspent the cloud budget in the last 12 months, with a quarter of those doing so by 25 per cent or more.

Application performance management tools (59 per cent) and cloud management platforms (52 per cent) were in widespread use for selecting optimal cloud resources but there was still a high degree of manual tweaking and 'best guess' optimisations. Meanwhile for container-based applications and microservices, the survey found that the use of automated tools to optimise CPU, memory and container size lagged well behind the rate of adoption of the newer deployment methodologies, with 'best guess' and 'tribal knowledge' being the most common practices.

"Cloud and containers have evolved so quickly that there currently is a lack of best practices and guidance around practices and solutions that ensure infrastructure resources are selected and managed efficiently," the report notes.

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