As noted in several of our previous articles, no matter how you slice it, the
40 AUTOMATION & ORCHESTRATION WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS
deployment in production. Since there is still confusion about what
container orchestration means, we made sure to ask broadly about what is being used to either manage or orchestrate containers. The
management, and then asked about the top three products or services to be used in the next year. This methodology forced respondents to
their future roadmaps.
primarily manage containers with shell scripts or customizations, which is provide multiple choices. While customizations may glue together multiple tools, they are usually not in and of themselves the main way to manage something.
Status of container adoption also correlates with the primary way of
orchestrating containers. Respondents that have started to use containers, management tools (21 percent) and shell scripts (21 percent). However, as users move forward on their “container journey,” the numbers drop to 16 and 10 percent respectively, possibly because the need for a more
consistent, scalable solution becomes apparent as production use
increases. Note that subscribers to DevOps Weekly were more likely to be considering its publisher’s day job is with Puppet Labs.
Looking at PaaS and CaaS, it appears that PaaS brand names like
41 AUTOMATION & ORCHESTRATION WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS
Source: The New Stack Survey, March 2016. What is the primary way containers are managed or orchestrated in your organization? Select all that apply. Using in production, n=91; Using, but not in production, n=24; Conducting trials/evaluation, n=23.
0 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%
Conducting trial projects or evaluation, but not otherwise using containers Using containers but not in production (e.g., in test or development lifecycles) Using containers to run production workloads
Platform as a Service
(e.g., OpenShift, Deis)
We use containers but we do not manage/orchestrate containers. Containers as a Service
(e.g., AWS ECS, IBM Bluemix, Joyent Triton Elastic Container Service, Docker Datacenter) (e.g., Chef, Ansible, Puppet Labs)
We use shell scripts and/or customizations to integrate multiple tools.
16% 21% 9% 10% 21% 17% 16% 4% 5% 8% 13% 5% 4% 13% 0% FIG 9: -
terprises move into production use.
CaaS is their primary management method. Of course, as we discussed people may consider it to be the provision of container services or
Despite all these other methods of managing containers, the leading choice by far was orchestration platforms like Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos, which were cited by 45 percent of respondents as their primary method of managing containers. Also described as a framework,
orchestration functionality (i.e., cluster management, scheduling). At least for now, it appears that purpose-built platforms are the orchestration
42 AUTOMATION & ORCHESTRATION WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%
Platform as a Service
(e.g., OpenShift, Deis)
We use containers but we do not manage/orchestrate containers. Containers as a Service
(e.g., AWS ECS, IBM Bluemix, Joyent Triton Elastic Container Service, Docker Datacenter) (e.g., Chef, Ansible, Puppet Labs)
We use shell scripts and/or customization to integrate multiple tools. Orchestration Platform
(e.g., Swarm, Kubernetes)
DevOps
Application Development IT Operations
Source: The New Stack Survey, March 2016. What functionality do you expect to be in a product described as a container orchestration tool? Select all that apply. IT Operations, n=20; Application Development, n=15; DevOps – Combination of IT Operations and Application Development, n=74.
20% 47% 49% 5% 27% 18% 35% 13% 8% 20% 0% 11% 10% 13% 7% 10% 0% 7%
FIG 10: CaaS and orchestration platforms like Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos com-
because of a preference for one type of tool or another.
IT operations is a job role that doesn’t seem as inclined to use orchestration platforms — fewer than half as many cited them as
compared to everyone else. Instead, 35 percent of IT ops primarily use everyone else. In addition, IT operations is just as likely to look towards CaaS as to orchestration platforms. In comparison to those with an
operations focus, respondents with application development roles were more likely (27 percent) to use shell scripts, which is not surprising since they are likely very comfortable hacking a custom solution together.
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The names behind the categories reported in the charts were revealed by asking about the top three products in users’ near-term plans as well as Mesos or Mesosphere DCOS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Docker Swarm. Kubernetes leads the list with 39 percent of respondents planning to use it. However, since it is not a purchasable product, it is hard to compare that result with the other entries in Figure 10. Another way to read the chart would be to identify products like Google Container Engine (GKE) and CoreOS Tectonic that are closely related to Kubernetes. Since many users of Amazon ECS also use Kubernetes, it is hard to determine how many of the 25 percent citing Amazon Web Services (AWS) plan to use it as their primary method of orchestration. The same issue arises with Mesosphere DCOS, which can be run on top of Amazon EC2.
One out of three respondents expect to use either Apache Mesos or order to account for respondents that think of them as synonymous. The sample likely over-represents plans to use Mesos because almost 50 percent of respondents citing Mesos or Mesosphere DCOS were solicited for participation by Mesosphere. However, even if those respondents are excluded, Mesos/Mesosphere would still be tied for fourth place with 23 percent.
The use of Docker for orchestration is understated if you only look at the version of Swarm was announced while the survey was being conducted, but so was a new product called Docker Datacenter. Furthermore, Tutum was renamed as Docker Cloud as a production version went live. There was no overlap between people citing Docker Datacenter and Docker
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Source: The New Stack Survey, March 2016. Within the next year, what are the top three products or services you expect to utilize to manage or orchestrate containers? n=114.
0 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40%
Microsoft Azure Container ServiceIronic Cobbler CloudFormsHeroku
Mantl DigitalOceanDeis CoreOS Tectonic Cloud Foundry Tool (e.g., Lattice, Diego)Rancher Docker Datacenter Heat or Another OpenStack ProjectDocker Cloud (Tutum) SaltStackChef
Puppet LabsOpenShift Google Container Engine (GKE)
HashiCorp Product (e.g., Nomad, Terraform)Docker Swarm
Amazon Elastic Container ServiceMesos or Mesosphere DCOS Ansible 2% 2% 2% 2%3% 4% 4% 4% 4% 4%6% 6%7% 7%9% 10%11% 11% 11%13% 23%25% 33% 36% 39%
FIG 11: Kubernetes, Ansible, Mesos/Mesosphere, Amazon ECS and Docker Swarm top
users’ plans for container orchestration.
Cloud, but seven of those 15 respondents did cite Swarm as another of their choices. Thus, looking at Docker more broadly, 31 percent plan to use the company’s products to manage containers.
Ansible was the choice of 36 percent of respondents, which surprisingly placed it second on users’ roadmaps. Among the Ansible respondents, method of orchestrating containers. It appears that Ansible will be used in conjunction with several other tools. Since Puppet Labs and Chef are also three are much more likely to be in the roadmaps of the respondents that are using containers but not in production. However, since Ansible is still
45 AUTOMATION & ORCHESTRATION WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS