State of the Container World, January 2016: Survey Results

--- title: " State of the Container World, January 2016 " date: 2016-02-01 slug: state-of-container-world-january-2016 url: /blog/2016/02/State-Of-Container-World-January-2016 author: > Brendan Burns (Google) --- At the start of the new year, we sent out a survey to gauge the state of the container world. We’re ready to send the [February edition](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13yxxBqb5igUhwrrnDExLzZPjREiCnSs-AH-y4SSZ-5c/viewform), but before we do, let’s take a look at the January data from the 119 responses (thank you for participating!). A note about these numbers: First, you may notice that the numbers don’t add up to 100%, the choices were not exclusive in most cases and so percentages given are the percentage of all respondents who selected a particular choice. Second, while we attempted to reach a broad cross-section of the cloud community, the survey was initially sent out via Twitter to followers of [@brendandburns](https://twitter.com/brendandburns), [@kelseyhightower](https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower), [@sarahnovotny](https://twitter.com/sarahnovotny), [@juliaferraioli](https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli), [@thagomizer\_rb](https://twitter.com/thagomizer_rb), so the audience is likely not a perfect cross-section. We’re working to broaden our sample size (have I mentioned our February survey? [Come take it now](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13yxxBqb5igUhwrrnDExLzZPjREiCnSs-AH-y4SSZ-5c/viewform)). #### Now, without further ado, the data: First off, lots of you are using containers! 71% are currently using containers, while 24% of you are considering using them soon. Obviously this indicates a somewhat biased sample set. Numbers for container usage in the broader community vary, but are definitely lower than 71%.  Consequently, take all of the rest of these numbers with a grain of salt. So what are folks using containers for? More than 80% of respondents are using containers for development, while only 50% are using containers for production. But you plan to move to production soon, as 78% of container users said that you were planning on moving to production sometime soon. Where do you deploy containers? Your laptop was the clear winner here, with 53% of folks deploying to laptops. Next up was 44% of people running on their own VMs (Vagrant? OpenStack? we’ll try dive into this in the February survey), followed by 33% of folks running on physical infrastructure, and 31% on public cloud VMs.

This blog post summarizes the results of a January 2016 survey about container usage. The survey, while potentially biased towards container users, found that 71% of respondents are currently using containers, primarily for development purposes, with many planning to move to production soon. The most common deployment environment is on laptops, followed by personal VMs and physical infrastructure.