Cloud Computing: Trends Toward Containerization

October 26, 2022

Federal organizations are trying to strike a scalable balance between cloud modernization and data security. How can agencies keep up with the latest advances in technology while protecting their infrastructure? IT Brand Pulse surveyed more than 200 IT professionals for SUSE to identify trends in cloud readiness and container adoption. One of the key takeaways is that there is an epic migration to cloud-native applications—containerized applications—which is driving the growth of container management. IT Brand Pulse estimates that the worldwide market for container management software and services will reach $1 billion within the next five years.

Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers and microservices are part and parcel of today’s cloud-native world, the building blocks of your cloud-ready foundation. In fact, IT professionals expect to have 56 percent of their applications containerized by 2027.

Why Containers?

If you’re still asking this question, you are well behind the curve. Containers are powerful, agile, and more efficient. They allow you to:

• Deliver apps to the cloud quicker
• Enable portability of apps
• Provide more efficient application life cycle management for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)

What Are the Obstacles and Opportunities?

While the majority of container deployments are in a hybrid or public cloud environment, the biggest challenges are for those with homegrown or on-premise implementations, largely in the public sector.

• In-house Expertise: Surprisingly, 34 percent of IT professionals are deploying containers strictly on-premise. In fact, the #1 obstacle to cloud migration and containerization identified in the survey is “expertise.” Free training providers and online courses are readily available, including the Rancher Community Academy.
• Stateful Applications: The most significant roadblock to fast adoption are your stateful applications due to the inherent data storage per session. Already 37 percent of IT professionals are using containers for stateful apps. In fact, SQL and Oracle (stateful databases) are the top two applications being targeted for the cloud. New releases of Kubernetes and Rancher will include support for persistent data volumes to simplify and accelerate the process.
• Multi-cloud Environments: Only 12 percent of multi-cloud users are deploying containers due to the complexities of moving workloads from one cloud to another. However, some vendors are now offering Multi-cloud Deployment Platforms (MCDP) to free users from cloud lock-in.

Where Are You in Your Cloud Journey?

Where do you see yourself in five years, and how will you get there? Rancher Federal is a leader in developing innovative, reliable open-source solutions for federal and government entities. We bring extensive experience in the U.S. Department of Defense, civilian government, and intelligence communities. Our expert team comprised entirely of U.S. citizens, provides security-cleared support for our products and U.S.-based code validation and penetration testing conducted by U.S. companies.

Meet us on May 26, 2022, at the Cloud Summit.