Over 80 percent of IT professionals and teams have deployed container technologies according to a new study from Portworx. This is up from 58 percent of teams that said they were running these technologies in 2017. The cloud-native storage company today also added new Kubernetes migration tools to its enterprise cloud native storage and data management platform.

The numbers come from Portworx’s 2018 Annual Container Adoption Survey. For the report, the company surveyed 519 IT professionals. Respondents were asked questions regarding their company's container usage, tooling, environments, and barriers to adoption.

The survey found that organizations are continuing to increase their financial investment in containers. In 2017, 57 percent of respondents said their company was making an investment. But in 2018 that grew to 91 percent. Portworx also found that the amount being invested was increasing: 12 percent of respondents said they were investing over $1 million annually, up from 4 percent last year.

And of those running container technologies, 83 percent are using them in production, an increase from 67 percent in 2017. The survey also demonstrated that the primary reason for adopting containers was to avoid lock-in and run applications on multiple clouds.

Portworx also surveyed to see what container management and container tools enterprises were using the most. Unsurprisingly, Kubernetes led the container management group. The company also reported that cloud-specific container offerings were becoming increasingly popular.

The survey asked respondents which cloud or multiple clouds they trust to run Kubernetes. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the highest with 23 percent, followed by Microsoft Azure with 21 percent, and Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud with 16 percent. However, when asked which public cloud provider was the most developer-friendly, 39 percent said Microsoft Azure. AWS followed closely behind with 31 percent.

In addition, respondents placed Azure on top as the best provider for advanced monitoring and management features, cost effectiveness, reliability, support and documentation, and for having supportive open standards.

However, while more organizations appear to be deploying container technologies, they are not without their challenges. According to Portnox, security was the top challenge, with data management, multi-cloud and cross data center management, reliability, scalability, and networking following suit.

For those who aren’t deploying containers, the survey suggests that lack of education and resources — including lack of compelling case studies — about containers was the largest barrier to adoption.

Also today, Portworx released version 2.0 of its PX-Enterprise platform with two primary updates. Now, Kubernetes users can migrate their application data and Kubernetes pod configurations between clusters. This enables cloud migration, as well as backup and recovery.

The second update allows enterprises to manage and monitor Kubernetes application data. With this upgrade, metrics are embedded directly into the Portworx dashboard so users can manage and monitor their container environments.

The previous release of this platform, which launched in September, added programmability features to give enterprises control over stateful services running across multiple clouds and container systems. Portworx also launched a software development kit (SDK) for the open source control plane used on the platform.