Interest in containers such as Docker appears to be surging, with more than 94 percent of enterprise respondents to a new survey reporting that they've either investigated or adopted container technology in the past 12 months.

The survey by DevOps.com, funded by software vendor ClusterHQ, polled 285 enterprise development and operations professionals in the latter half of May. Only 38 percent of respondents said they were using containers in actual production environments.

Still, those numbers are quite high. A recent — and more extensive — survey from 451 Research found that only 6 percent of enterprise respondents reported using containers in production environments, with 20 percent reporting no plans to adopt the technology, according to LinuxInsider. (The DevOps.com survey was conducted through that publication's mailing list, but "also circulated via a number of other channels," a spokeswoman says.)

Regardless of the exact figures, the trend lines seem clear: containers are gaining traction fast. That's good news for Docker Inc., which makes the popular open source container platform of the same name, and also a potential boon to the many container management and orchestration products racing to gain an early foothold.

Though containers can typically run on bare metal, there are signs that broad adoption might not spell doom for the server virtualization market. The new survey found 73 percent of respondents run containers in a hypervisor virtualized environment, with only 21 percent running them on bare metal.