At Docker’s most recent eponymous conference, DockerCon 2018, in San Francisco, Docker revealed that 50 percent of attendees had started using container technology within the last 12 months. This statistic highlights both the enormous growth in the space, as well as the level of maturation. But if you consider the large crowds and healthy year-over-year growth at all the recent container and cloud-related conferences you can see that there is still significant growth and innovation left in the space.

All this new blood makes for a battle by the cloud giants to dominate both mind and market share. In SDxCentral Research’s new Container Infrastructure Report, we cover the implications of recent innovations by the cloud giants Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into the containers-as-a-service (CaaS) arena. The likes of AWS Fargate and Microsoft Azure Container Instances (ACI) that complement existing offerings (Kubernetes-powered AWS EKS and Azure AKS) are meant to make deploying containers into the cloud easier for application developers--especially newly-minted ‘containerites’ that are not ready to manage the complexity of Kubernetes.

While these cloud players innovate on the cluster management and orchestration front, we also see continued changes on the infrastructure side. For example, improvements in container networking have made connecting across containers (and VMs and bare metal) feasible and secure. In addition, container storage has matured to provide container-native and container-friendly storage options as well as container security.

And yet, while rapid transformation benefits the sophisticated and already up-to-date container practitioners who crave the rapid updates and changes, organizations just starting to migrate to containers face a world of confusion. For instance, just trying to wrap their heads around Amazon’s ECS vs EKS vs Fargate and the differences and when and why one would use one vs the other scares new container acolytes. And for enterprise application architects familiar with the world of virtual machines but trying to move themselves and their organizations into the container framework, getting an appreciation for the security, networking and storage options (quite different in the world of containers) can be a Herculean feat.

SDxCentral Research believes containers will be the de facto new application development and deployment environment in the near future, but for the transition to be successful, education of developers and IT teams is critical. The SDxCentral Container Infrastructure Report plays a role in this and is a must-read for developers, infrastructure architects, line-of-business owners looking to start their transition, or simply keep up to date with the innovations in containers.