Container survey results - March 2016

Last month, we had our third installment of our container survey and today we look at the results.  (raw data is available here)

Looking at the headline number, “how many people are using containers” we see a decrease in the number of people currently using containers from 89% to 80%.  Obviously, we can’t be certain for the cause of this decrease, but it’s my believe that the previous number was artificially high due to sampling biases and we did a better job getting a broader reach of participants in the March survey and so the March numbers more accurately represent what is going on in the world.

Along the lines of getting an unbiased sample, I’m excited to announce that going forward, we will be partnering with The New Stack and theCloud Native Compute Foundation to publicize and distribute this container survey.  This partnership will enable us to reach a broader audience than we are reaching and thus obtain a significantly more unbiased sample and representative portrayal of current container usage.  I’m really excited about this collaboration!

But without further ado, more on the data.

For the rest of the numbers, the March survey shows steady continuation of the numbers that we saw in February.  Most of the container usage is still in Development and Testing, though a solid majority (60%) are using it for production as well.  For the remaining folks using containers there continues to be a plan to bring containers to production as the “I am planning to” number for production use matches up nearly identically with the numbers for people currently in testing.

Physical and virtual machines continue to be the most popular places to deploy containers, though the March survey shows a fairly substantial drop (48% -> 35%) in people deploying to physical machines.

Likewise hosted container services show growth, with nearly every service showing some growth.  Google Container Engine continues to be the most popular in the survey, followed by the Amazon EC2 Container Service.  It will be interesting to see how those numbers change as we move to the New Stack survey.

Finally, Kubernetes is still the favorite for container manager, with Bash scripts are still in second place.  As with the container service provider numbers I’ll be quite interested to see what this looks like with a broader sample set.

Finally, the absolute use of containers appears to be ticking up.  The number of people running more than 250 containers has grown from 12% to nearly 20%.  And the number people running containers on 50 or more machines has grown from 10% to 18%.

As always, the raw data is available for you to analyze here.

--Brendan Burns, Software Engineer, Google

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