Worldwide container management revenue will grow strongly from a small base of $465.8 million in 2020, to reach $944 million in 2024, according to a new forecast from Gartner. Public cloud container orchestration and serverless container offerings will experience the most significant growth.
“There has been considerable hype and a high level of interest in container technology, but a lower level of production deployments to date,” said Michael Warrilow, research vice president at Gartner.
Containers have become popular because they provide a powerful tool for addressing several critical concerns of application developers, including the need for faster delivery, agility, portability, modernization and life cycle management.
Roman Tuma, IBM Asia Pacific chief technology officer for Cloud, noted that with the current crisis accelerating the transformation to the cloud, organisations across Asia-Pacific are asking a number of questions including which of the applications to migrate and which ones to modernize.
“From an architectural perspective, containers are the correct way to exploit the portability of workloads as well as the “write once, run anywhere” depending on whatever’s appropriate, be that a private cloud or a public cloud – running on a Linux operating system. And Kubernetes is the way to do automation and to really bring a lot of complexity-reduction or simplicity to how you get the work deployed,” he elaborated.
Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today.
As a result of the growing use of containers, enterprise demand for container management is increasing. Container management provides software and/or services that support the management of containers, at scale, in production environments.
Drivers of container management growth
The forecast growth in enterprise adoption of container management indicates the intrinsic appeal of cloud-native architecture, said Gartner.
“Understanding of ‘cloud-native’ varies, but it has significant potential benefits over traditional, monolithic application design, such as scalability, elasticity and agility. It is also strongly associated with the use of containers,” explained Warrilow.
Containers in the field
Danny Elmarji, vice president, presales, Asia Pacific & Japan at Dell Technologies says Gartner’s forecast strongly echoes what is happening in the field. He added that organisations are seeing the need to become digital, innovate quickly and remove lengthy development cycles associated with legacy application architectures.
This vision is rapidly fuelling their goals to containerise twenty to thirty per cent of their applications within these two years. It is no longer acceptable for them to wait six or twelve months to make application changes and implement new features to attract and retain customers or capitalise on business opportunities. There is little doubt that containers are now a fundamental component to enabling continuous integration and delivery of applications.
“Across APAC, we are seeing customers from the banking & financial services as well as telecommunications using containers to either build new cloud-native applications or to port and encapsulate legacy applications into modern cloud systems,” he elaborated.
Some bad news
Several factors will restrict adoption among organizations developing or modernizing custom applications. Despite the need to support digital transformation, initiatives will be curbed by recessed economic conditions for at least the medium term, as organizational priorities shift to cost optimization.
Gartner expects that up to 15% of enterprise applications will run in a container environment by 2024, up from less than 5% in 2020, hampered by application backlog, technical debt and budget constraints.
Warrilow noted that the bottleneck will be the speed at which applications can be refactored and/or replaced.
