In January, 71% of respondents were currently using containers, in February, 89% of respondents were currently using containers. The percentage of users not even considering containers also shrank from 4% in January to a surprising 0% in February. Will see if that holds consistent in March.Likewise, the usage of containers continued to march across the dev/canary/prod lifecycle. In all parts of the lifecycle, container usage increased:

• Development: 80% -> 88%
• Test: 67% -> 72%
• Pre production: 41% -> 55%
• Production: 50% -> 62%

What is striking in this is that pre-production growth continued, even as workloads were clearly transitioned into true production. Likewise the share of people considering containers for production rose from 78% in January to 82% in February. Again we’ll see if the trend continues into March.

Container and cluster sizes

We asked some new questions in the survey too, around container and cluster sizes, and there were some interesting numbers:

How many containers are you running?

How many machines are you running containers on?

So while container usage continues to grow, the size and scope continues to be quite modest, with more than 50% of users running fewer than 50 containers on fewer than 10 machines.

Things stay the same

Across the orchestration space, things seemed pretty consistent between January and February (Kubernetes is quite popular with folks (54% -> 57%), though again, please see the note at the top about the likely bias in our survey population. Shell scripts likewise are also quite popular and holding steady. You all certainly love your Bash (don’t worry, we do too ;) Likewise people continue to use cloud services both in raw IaaS form (10% on GCE, 30% on EC2, 2% on Azure) as well as cloud container services (16% for GKE, 11% on ECS, 1% on ACS). Though the most popular deployment target by far remains your laptop/desktop at ~53%.

Raw data

Thanks!

-- Brendan Burns, Software Engineer, Google