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Docker: What Will 2016 Bring for Containers?

Look out for containers-as-a-service.

• By David Messina
• 01/08/2016

1. Container use will continue its rapid rise. With downloads of Docker images having risen from 67 million in December 2014 to 1.2 billion just a year later, that containers will become the prevalent mechanism for application development and deployment is clear. Recent research shows that 40 percent of organizations using Docker have it in production currently, and those numbers are expected to rise sharply in the coming year.

2. Applications will define everything. The ability to develop apps that can be deployed anywhere using containerization lessens the demands, and therefore the focus, on the datacenter and software-defined datacenter (SDDC) architectures. Dev, Ops and IT as a whole will be allowed to think more in terms of what benefits end users most, unconstrained by the costly and time-consuming infrastructure management, expansion and enablement technologies that have confined them to date.

3. The rise of Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) will facilitate Ops-originated application delivery. Deployment and use of containers in production will be greatly eased by operations-led CaaS architectures focused on enabling IT's ability to deconstruct monolithic application architectures in favor of microservices. CaaS will succeed without requiring organizational changes, as seen with the rise of DevOps, eliminating the need to retool and re-skill by refocusing on what Ops can do for Dev through integration of core and container technologies, thereby creating a more circular pattern of collaboration.

4. The balance between Dev and Ops, agility and control, will be improved. Container-based services will evolve to be operations-led instead of a developer-only model. Dev and Ops will share the development lifecycle, with Ops setting up development environments in which everything, from security to management, is baked into the platform.

5. Containers will move beyond Dev and Test to become a production mainstay. Integration of enabling technologies from the broad container ecosystem, in addition to accelerated innovation from de-facto container leaders, will move container deployments into the mainstream.