Portworx Survey: Financial Investment in Container Technology Grows, Annual Investments of $1 Million-Plus More than Double Year-Over-Year

LOS ALTOS, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 12, 2017) - Portworx, the leading provider of container data services for DevOps, today announced the results of its Annual Container Adoption Survey 2017, which features insights from 491 IT professionals across a variety of industries and company sizes. The survey, conducted in March 2017, asked questions about the state of container usage, tooling, environments and barriers to adoption to get a snapshot of the container market landscape today. The survey analyzed multi-year datasets from last year's Portworx survey and from the 2015 and 2016 surveys conducted by recently closed ClusterHQ to draw conclusions about how container adoption has changed over time.

This year's Container Adoption Survey found that financial investment in containers is continuing to grow; the number of $1 million-plus investments more than doubled year-over-year to 10 percent, up from only 4 percent in 2016. A full 32 percent of respondents with knowledge of their companies' financial investment stated that they are now spending more than $500,000 annually on license and usage fees for container technologies. Spending for personnel to use container technologies increased at a similar rate; the percentage of surveyed companies investing more than $1 million annually in personnel rose from 6.5 percent in 2016 to 13 percent in 2017.

"Enterprise investment in container technologies and associated personnel will continue to grow rapidly as more organizations use containers in production and realize the substantial efficiency and cost savings benefits," said Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder of Portworx. "For container adoption to become mainstream in the enterprise, the container ecosystem of vendors and partners must provide DevOps teams with adequate tools to successfully deploy containers at scale across any environment."

Key Findings:

• For two consecutive years, persistent storage was named as the top challenge of running containers; this year, 26 percent of the sample said it was their most difficult challenge.
• Security and networking are no longer top challenges. Networking is a top challenge for only 10 percent of the sample, and only 7 percent thought security is a top challenge.
• When asked about storage challenges, 46 percent of the sample stated that they lacked adequate tools for managing container storage and 39 percent had concerns about data loss. These concerns echo those people who have concerns about persistent storage in general. Twenty-six percent of respondents complained that storage does not effectively scale with the number of containers.
• In 2017, other top challenges included data management (13 percent) and multi-cloud or cross-datacenter support (10 percent).
• Kubernetes is the most widely utilized orchestration tool, with 43 percent of respondents confirming they currently use it and 32 percent noting it is their primary orchestration tool.
• Thirty-one percent of respondents say they are using Amazon ECS (up from 21 percent in 2016), with 12 percent saying it is their primary orchestration tool (up from 10 percent in 2016). However, most people seem to be experimenting, as 46 percent of ECS users are also using Kubernetes and 35 percent are also using Docker Swarm.
• Seventy-nine percent of the sample chose Docker as their primary container technology, demonstrating that the Docker Engine project continues to be synonymous with containers.
• Thirty percent of the sample said they are using Docker Swarm, with 18 percent saying it is their primary scheduler.
• Usage of Windows containers has tripled year-over-year. In 2017, nearly one-third of the sample (29 percent) was running containers on Windows, up from only 9 percent in 2016.
  
  

Download the full 2017 Portworx Annual Container Adoption Survey Report here.

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About Portworx
Portworx is container data services, designed for DevOps. Automation is the lifeblood of DevOps, and Portworx automates the deployment and operations of data services at scale. With Portworx, users can run any database or stateful service with any scheduler on any infrastructure. Users get a single data management layer for all their stateful services, no matter where they run. Portworx customers include GE Digital, Lufthansa Systems, University of Toronto, TGen and Fortune 500 names in banking and entertainment. For more information, visit portworx.com.