Chapter 6: 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration Survey Results

With the drive towards software-defined infrastructures, businesses worldwide are looking to cloud, VM and container technologies for hosting their applications. One of the keys to success in this move towards new application infrastructure technologies is orchestration and automation. Our report will cover the key methods of orchestrating and automating these infrastructures, including DevOps processes and methodologies. It will also include results from original research conducted on current perceptions and experiences with these technologies.

The original research is the result of a survey hosted on SDxCentral during the month of May. Participation was restricted to end users – 33% were “Enterprises,” 31% “Communications Service Providers,” 19% “Cloud Service Providers” and 16% “Other.” 2017 marked the third year of this survey, so, when appropriate, our research team compared results from our 2015 and 2016 surveys to determine if there were any meaningful trendlines that could help us see where the market is going.

Types of Clouds Currently Deployed

When it comes to the types of clouds organizations are currently using, there is a mix of public and private cloud platforms deployed. In-house private clouds continue to be the most popular platform currently in use (at 55%) – after a big drop in usage between 2015 to 2016, from 70% to 52%, in-house private clouds seemed to have stabilized.

It is clear organizations over the years are becoming increasingly comfortable relying on public and hybrid clouds – 40% of respondents this year said their organizations use public clouds, and 54% use hybrid cloud platforms (note, we didn’t ask about hybrid clouds in 2015). Hybrid clouds actually saw the biggest bump in usage this year, crossing the halfway mark, going from 49% in 2016 to 54%. Managed private cloud usage continues to decline, from 42% in 2015 to 34% in 2016 and then 32% in 2017.

Container and Cloud Orchestration Survey Results - Cloud Platforms Deployed

Biggest Challenges with Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds

Private Clouds

When asked what participants saw as the biggest challenge today in private clouds, more than a third (36%) indicated it was the ability to ‘design the right cloud platform.’ This has consistently been the top problem picked by survey participants over the years. Interestingly, the ‘performance of cloud platforms,’ which was the third biggest challenge in 2015’s survey (picked by 20% of participants), no longer seems to be such a prominent concern (only getting 7% of the vote in 2016 and 8% in 2017). When participants could expand their selections to what they saw as the top three challenges in private clouds (in 2016 and 2017), ‘maintaining and upgrading cloud platforms’ was chosen by the most participants, at 69%.