Enterprises looking to garner more efficiency from their cloud operations are increasingly turning to containers.

SDxCentral recently conducted a survey as part of our 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration report,  and found a spike in container usage. In fact, it appears that containers could surpass virtual machines (VMs) as the application development platform of choice.

One of the more striking takeaways from the survey was the increased use of containers, which surged from just 8 percent in 2016, to 45 percent this year. Of the 55 percent of respondents not currently using containers, 45 percent said they expect to make the move in the next year.

“That will set the stage towards the future, where containers become the new dominant application platform to be managed, instead of virtual machines,” the report noted.

The lean operating nature of containers was viewed by most as central to their container usage. This showed with 62 percent of respondents citing “faster spin up and down” as the reason for their use; 58 percent stating a “lower perceived overhead” than virtual machines (VMs); and nearly half (47 percent) said they were using containers for their “ease of management.”

Linux-based Kubernetes was the dominate choice for container orchestration among those surveyed, with 64 percent stating their use of the platform. Thirty-six percent said they were using Docker Swarm, while 18 percent said they were using Apache’s Mesos.

For the 55 percent of respondents that were not currently using container technology, 51 percent cited a “lack of maturity” for their hesitance; a “lack of management and deployment tools” were cited by 27 percent of non-users; while 24 percent said they didn’t yet “know how to scale containers.”

The survey also touched on the cloud environments and DevOps models used by the market, which are key to the use of containers.

Among cloud types being used, private clouds maintained their slight majority, with 55% of those surveyed keeping their cloud operations on a tight leash. However, 54 percent said they are now using a hybrid cloud model, compared with 49 percent last year, while public cloud use increased from 34 percent last year to 40 percent this year.

Among public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) remained the overwhelming choice of respondents. But, the results showed Microsoft had narrowed the gap between its Azure cloud and AWS cloud in terms of functionality.

Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) has moved into a “credible” position as an alternative to AWS and Azure, with IBM, Oracle, and SAP “increasingly making their presences felt within their core enterprise customer base.”

Among cloud management platforms, OpenStack maintained a slight advantage over VMware’s vCloud and vCenter offerings. Both held a significant advantage over CloudStack in the survey.

The survey also looked into the use of DevOps tools, with 62 percent of respondents stating they used such tools in their organizations. That number was down slightly from the previous year, indicating: “the adoption curve may be tapering off.”

Of DevOps tools being used, Red Hat’s Ansible platform was indicated by 37 percent, well ahead of 27 percent using Puppet, and 25 percent using Chef.