Container adoption is real, and the problem of persistent storage is one of the key problems related to it that needs to be solved, according to Mohit Bhatnagar, vice president of product at ClusterHQ, which this week at DockerCon is talking about the Container Market Adoption Survey it just released.
This Seattle event is being held by Docker, a company whose container technology is the clear leader in this product category, is used by millions of developers, and has been embraced by hundreds of ecosystem partners. ClusterHQ, which is one of those ecosystem partners, sells an open source container data volume manager for Dockerized applications. It’s called Flocker, and it enables ops teams to run containerized stateful services like databases in production.
There’s been a nearly 100 percent increase in container usage in production since last year, said Bhatnagar, pointing out that of the 297 individuals who weighed in on this survey topic, 79 percent of them are running container technologies, and 76 percent of them are running container technologies in production. “It clearly shows containers are becoming part of an organization’s mission-critical architectures,” he added.
People are using containers, he explained, to increase developer efficiency (38 percent), support microservices architectures (36 percent), for other reasons (12 percent), to enable apps to run on multiple clouds (11 percent), and to move away from expensive VM licenses (3 percent). (These percentages are of the 226 individuals who responded to this survey question.) The rankings in this category are good news, he said, because they demonstrate that containers are not just a cost savings play.
Here are a few other data points from the survey:
• Of respondents who had knowledge of their company’s financial investment into containers, 52 percent reported that their company is making a financial investment on this front, sometimes in the millions of dollars.
• Of the respondents who said they have been making a monetary investment in containers, 56 percent reported that this has been occurring for less than a year.
• Seventy-two percent of organizations using containers said they met or exceeded business and IT objectives.
But the most interesting part of the study based on the survey results has to do with what challenges have been most difficult for container users to overcome, said Bhatnagar. For a quarter of the 205 who responded to this question, the answer is persistent storage, he said, adding that security topped last year’s list. “This tells me people are beginning to adopt containers for both stateful and for stateless storage,” he added.
Today if a user has a container with data in it, and that container dies, the data dies with it, he explained. However, persistent storage moves that data to another container to avoid that loss.