Atlantis Computing - http://bit.ly/2nXdGMz

WHAT'S AHEAD FOR C ONTAINERS

Ruben Spruijt, Field CTO of Atlantis Computing

Evolution of Containers

• Storage virtualization will continue to progressively transform physical infrastructure, management and architecture, which is also changing how storage for enterprise workloads are delivered. However, server virtualization never significantly changed the way enterprise workloads were delivered as compared to physical servers. In 2017 we will start to see this evolve with an increased focus on containers.

• Containers are all about flexibility and deployment of just the application and work well within cloud environments. Containers will continue to gain traction as the concept matures further in 2017. A container can be shipped to a public cloud platform easily, meaning more newly developed applications will be utilizing containers in 2017.

Automic Software - http://bit.ly/2n7rWVz

WHY THE HYPE AROUND C ONTAINERS WILL GIV E WAY TO OPS IN 2017

Lucas Carlson, VP of strategy, Automic Software

Container Hype Will Keep Going Up While Adoption Will Stay Pitifully Small

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't think containers won't take off. They just won't take off in 2017. I've spoken with too many Fortune 1000's to keep my rose-tinted glasses on. Of course companies like LinkedIn, Netflix, Google, and Amazon will be using containers more and more. But those companies do not represent the majority of IT organizations in the world today. Despite the hype, containers have a few more years before they are ready for the mainstream.

The Rise of Ops

A lot of the containerization trends have been pushed by developers. DevOps isn't the merging of developers with operation - it's developers trying to get around operations, and that pendulum has swung way too far toward the developers. It's about time that operations gets a makeover. Instead of shoving Puppet and Chef and Jenkins down the throats of operations groups, in 2017 we will see a new class of tools built specifically for operations that rise up and meet the challenges that DevOps has brought to a head. Look out for the return of operations in a big way.

CloudBees - http://bit.ly/2nE9ZPJ

C ONTAINERS: HERE'S WHAT'S C OMING IN 2017

Viktor Farcic, senior consultant, CloudBees

Everyone talks about containers. It became so huge that we think Docker has existed for a long time. The fact is that it has only started.

• The significant change will be that 2017 will be focused not that much around running containers but scheduling them inside clusters. Solutions like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos (just to name a few) will become mainstream. We will see more and more solutions that will go beyond simple scheduling. We will see the rise of self-healing systems. In 2017, the battle for the "uber orchestrator" will become much more prominent.

• With the broader containers adoption, continuous deployment (CDP) will become a thing again. For quite some time, we had a lot of talk around CDP but not enough real-world use cases. The idea was there, but we lacked the tools to support it. Since containers will enter enterprise organizations, they will revisit CDP and start implementing it in parallel with container adoption. As a result, we will see new solutions around CDP. The focus will be on automation of all the steps that follow the commit. While some think that this subject is already being talked about, I think that it will continue being the focus, but in a more practical way. We will get away from theory and move towards CDP being a practice exercised in the majority of companies.

• One of the most existing areas that will become prominent in 2017 will be unikernels. While the majority of the industry is still trying to scratch their heads around containers, we will start seeing unikernels taking over the stage. They will, in a way, unify functionalities provided by VMs and containers.

ClusterHQ - http://bit.ly/2mmnlA8

C ONTAINERS GET REAL IN 2017

Serge Pashenkov, CTO, ClusterHQ

People will talk less about containers in 2017 and more about applications

• Technology comes in waves. When containers exploded a couple years ago, it was all containers, all the time. But containers only serve to make applications easier to build, ship and run to borrow a phrase. People will think more about applications overall in 2017, rather than just the components that make them up.

...but the importance of container management will grow

• Containers allow for convenient packaging and delivery of individual executables, in other words, application components. Individual components are useless, however, and only become useful when connected together with other components. This is where a container manager, sometimes called an orchestration framework, increases in importance since the container manager provides a system for running applications overall, not just individual containers. Over the next year container management will have its place in the sun.

The battle between container management tools will shift to storage

• Container orchestration frameworks have focused mainly on managing compute and networking to date. Storage was practically ignored. However, as the heart of every application, data is centrally important. 2017 will become a year of focusing on storage for containerized applications.

Cypherpath - http://bit.ly/2nXoiuO

A R E A L UPT ICK IN T HE USE O F MICR O SER VICES IN E NT E R PR ISE DATA CE NT E R INFR A ST R UCTUR E DE PLOYMENT S

Danial Faizullabhoy, CEO of Cypherpath

Microservices support becomes the next big thing

• Microservices, which provide individualized tools for working in the cloud, are helping developers to continuously deploy and iterate on existing applications at greater speed than ever before. This makes them indispensable for any company with its own proprietary application or service and needs to lower latency costs or boost performance. However, since microservices depend on the underlying IT stack, which requires a host of provisioned resources, extensively deploying them in the same manner as the apps they service remains a stumbling block. As a result, 2017 will see more vendors that specialize in supporting the deployment of microservices as a business model in a way that was similar to what Docker achieved with containers.

Developers demand more lightweight Oss

• Application containers were originally created to be portable and agnostic to the operating systems they were supposed to run on, meaning they could work on any infrastructure. But with more heterogeneous apps and microservices quickly requiring developers to be connected to underlying operating system resources, 2017 will see more and more developers deploying apps on stripped down, lightweight OS's that can also cluster metal and then distribute the applications at scale.

The definition of "container" expands

• The idea of using containers beyond app development and testing is still new, but the concept of containers will soon expand to other areas of IT. Storage, networking and even compute can all be encapsulated in specialty containers that allow users to build, manage and transfer these resources among virtual data centers. In 2017, we expect a broader discussion about what we mean when we say "container" and why encapsulating other aspects of DevOps can be beneficial in the enterprise.

Diamanti - http://bit.ly/2ntJBHX

DATA AND OPERATIONS DRIV E THE 2017 C ONTAINER AGENDA

Mark Balch, VP of products and marketing, Diamanti

Containers Will Drive New Innovation to the Data Tier

• In 2017 I predict we're going to see a lot of innovation in data architecture. It's an area that has always been, and continues to be, the most challenging aspect of deploying and scaling applications. Everything has to touch data, and with containers and microservices you have that many more moving parts that are exposing the inflexibility of traditional data tier technologies. Practices that became commonplace in the traditional scale-up world -- overprovisioning, fixed configurations leaned on as crutches -- we are seeing challenged by containers in particular, and the network and storage landscape is going to rapidly evolve to meet the demands of distributed, micro-services.

Container Operations Will Become the New Battleground

• While containers enable faster application development cycles, IT ops is slowed by today's virtualized model with its multiple layers of infrastructure, rigid complexity and high costs. There's a fundamental mismatch between the speed that developer teams need to move, and the very manual, expensive and time-intensive operational requirements for operating containers at scale, using existing network and storage systems. 2017 will be a year where the orchestration tool providers (Kubernetes, DC/OS, SWARM) really push innovation into the networking and storage infrastructure - in particular - to focus on automation (where possible), ease of use, and allowing production container users to deploy and scale without forklifting their existing infrastructure.

Docker - http://bit.ly/2mmC4el

C ONTAINERS WILL DRIVE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION IN 2017

David Messina, SVP of Marketing, Docker

The rapid expansion of production container deployment in enterprises worldwide has led to a movement toward containers-as-a-service (CaaS) over traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. Advances in container management tooling are leading operations to embrace CaaS as a solution to enable developers to containerize their legacy applications and then build microservices around them. This trend will rise rapidly in 2017, driven by increased collaboration across IT disciplines and enthusiasm surrounding containerization even at the board level.

2017 will be the true tipping point for CaaS, with virtually all companies running at least some containers in production and porting legacy applications to containers. This will drive production deployments from 30-50 percent (as estimated by various polls in 2016) of enterprises to 75-90 percent.

Rising confidence in container security, to the point that developers consider containers more secure than alternative technologies, will drive an increase in the use of CaaS, displacing legacy PaaS approaches to application development and deployment. This requirement for integrated security at every phase of the software supply chain will rise to the surface in the upcoming year.

The increase in production deployment and adoption across verticals and geographies will continue to drive a wave of opportunity for systems integrators and resellers with CaaS expertise, accelerating the need and opportunity cross-platform integration and associated training. Because CaaS solutions are more flexible, integrators will have the opportunity to optimize for the organizations that they work with through integrations with their existing tools in the realm of networking, monitoring, storage, etc. This will give them the opportunity to build a practice on CaaS.

The coming year will be one of unification among container vendors, with strong contributions from de facto leaders making more core capabilities available to all as open source, and differentiation being established farther downstream, closer to the end user. At the high end of the market, Fortune 100 enterprises with strong container adoption and deployment strategies will drive cooperation, rather than increased competition, from container leaders.

NuoDB - http://bit.ly/2nXucw8

APPETITE FOR C ONTAINERS TO ACC ELERATE IN 2017

• Docker and Containers have already become the de facto deployment style for internet companies. Expect to see broad enterprise adoption in 2017.

• There are around 500,000 Dockerized applications, a growth of 3,000% over two years. Over 4 billion containers have been pulled to date. The numbers are astonishing, and there is no reason to believe that the trend will slow down. Thus far, most of the activity has been among ultra-early adopters, not mainstream IT shops. But we are seeing this change rapidly, and 2017 will be the pivotal year.

• In 2016, Wall Street banks certified Docker as a deployment platform, along with container ecosystem components. The technology is moving from the domain of the advanced technology groups to the datacenter. We can expect that what happens on Wall St will soon happen elsewhere in the enterprise.

Barry Morris, Co-Founder, NuoDB

Rancher Labs - http://bit.ly/2mJeZ0u

RAPID ADOPTION AND INNOVATION TO C OME

Shannon Williams, co-founder of Rancher Labs

Rapid adoption of container orchestration frameworks

• As more companies use containers in production, adoption of orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes, Mesos, Cattle and Docker Swarm will increase as well. These projects have evolved quickly in terms of stability, community and partner ecosystem, and will act as necessary and enabling technologies for enterprises using containers more widely in production.

Greater innovation in container infrastructure services

• Though there's a strong set of container storage and networking solutions on the market today, more products will emerge to support the growth and scale of production container workloads, particularly as specifications like Container Network Interface (used by Kubernetes) continue to mature. Companies like StorageOS, Portworx and Quobyte will see more adoption.

Infrastructure clusters as code emerges

• To reinforce the ability to write once and run anywhere, orchestration clusters will be increasingly templated and instantiated from blueprints, in the same way containerized apps are deployed as Docker Compose files. Users will define exactly the Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos deployment configuration they need, along with any infrastructure services, and then deploy it on whatever cloud or virtualization infrastructure they choose. Users have been asking for this function for over a year, and the latest version of Rancher takes steps towards this vision by enabling users to deliver complete, container-ready environments asmodular, customizable templates.

Docker accelerates ARM server adoption

• We are likely still a ways from the real "year of the ARM server," but containers will definitely help accelerate adoption of ARM in the datacenter. Containers run the same on ARM servers as they do on Intel servers, but with the potential to dramatically reduce costs. Hosting companies like Packet are now offering ARM servers on demand in hourly increments; containers and thin Linux distributions like RancherOS make it possible to take advantage of these hosting solutions, in turn making ARM servers an interesting option for certain workloads.

Red Hat - http://bit.ly/2ntmAVI

IT 'S NOT “C ONTAINERS OR V IRTUALIZATION.” IT 'S “C ONTAINERS AND V IRTUALIZATION.”

• Virtualization is here to stay, and containers make it more important.

• There's a belief that containers and virtualization are essentially the same thing. This is absolutely not true - containers and virtualization do have a lot in common, but not as much as some people think. They're complementary, not competitive.

• Virtual machines (VMs) can be a perfect environment for running containerized workloads. VMs deliver the necessary compute resources in a more secure, familiar environment that you already trust, while containers can speed application deployment and management as necessary.

• The trick is getting all of these things to work together. That's where a open, standards-based frameworks like OpenShift, OpenStack and Red Hat Virtualization can help, by acting as a "manager" to help enterprises gain the innovative aspects of Linux containers on existing infrastructure.

Gunnar Hellekson is the Director of Product Management for Red Hat's Linux, Virtualization, and Atomic container product lines.

Reduxio - http://bit.ly/2nXiOQS

C ONTAINERS: INC REASING DEPLOYMENT AND ADOPTION

Jacob Cherian, product vision and strategy, Reduxio

• 2016 saw data technology companies - legacy and startups - beginning to launch products that make it easier to create and manage storage for containers. Containers that were primarily deployed for dev ops environments will see growing adoption in production environments as customers rearchitect legacy monolithic applications or build new applications using microservices architecture based on containers to realize flexibility and velocity that was not previously possible.

• The move from dev ops to production environments introduces the need for data persistence and data recovery when there are issues. Companies will be looking to vendors that have the necessary innovative features that will allow them to reduce the time window for the loss of data to complement the rapid recovery capability inherent to containers and microservices architecture - demanding faster recovery up to a second before an issue.

SolarWinds - http://bit.ly/2nfJY8A

C LARITY ON C ONTAINERS

Kong Yang, Head Geek, SolarWinds

Containers from the likes of Google, Docker, CoreOS and Joyent continue to be a key area of discussion in the cloud computing space. In the past year, organizations across all major industries, from finance to e-commerce, took notice of containers as an exciting new method of operating system virtualization. However, this broader industry awareness led to a wave of rapid adoption without a fundamental understanding of the differences between containers and virtual machines.

Despite many early adopters implementing them as such, containers are not part and parcel replacements for virtual machines. In short, a container consists of an entire runtime environment-an application, its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it-bundled into one package designed for lightweight, short-term use. When implemented correctly, containers enable much more agile and portable software development environments.

We predict that in 2017, IT departments at large will finally come to a greater understanding of the fundamentals of container technology and how it can realistically and appropriately be used for IT operations alongside virtual infrastructure. For example, by packaging workloads into containers, which can spin up very quickly on other vendor platforms if needed, IT professionals can gain some of that management and control element back from public cloud infrastructure SLAs. Early adopters that likely implemented containerization in the last several years, without a specific strategy or use cases in mind, will also need to reassess their initial deployments to determine whether they are seeing any noticeable benefits.

The proliferation of containers as a compute strategy within IT departments will simultaneously give rise to greater security concerns-such as the risk of multiple containers being hacked through a single host OS kernel and, similar to VMs, sprawl-and the need for IT professionals that are skilled in specific coding languages related to containerization.

Virtuozzo - http://bit.ly/2mmmY8H

C ONTAINERS C ONQUER PRODUC TION WORK LOADS

Pete Wermter, VP Marketing, Virtuozzo

2017 marks the year that vendors should strive to bridge the gap between IT and the emerging container world. Utilizing the technology, tools and processes invented by the most efficient and innovative companies for use in modern enterprise environments will open the doors for the widespread adoption of containers.

Key tips for success:

1) Adopt container production hygiene, featuring strict backward compatibility and a stable runtime version with a long support lifetime.

2) Unbundle container standards from the implementation, and orchestration from the runtime environment.

3) Solve persistent storage issues and adopt traditional databases into the world of containers.

4) Ensure that you address any broad security problems and multi-tenancy issues.

5) Create a robust set of tools for container auditing, monitoring, logging and debugging.

We are amid a major transformation in the way IT is consumed, managed and optimized. 2017 will be a breakthrough year for production-ready containers and their impact on the virtualization space will bring about massive change in IT service delivery.

VMware - http://bit.ly/2nLE7pc

DIV INING THE DATA C ENTER

Kit Colbert, CTO, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware

Kubernetes will break away from the pack of container schedulers

• In 2016, a three-horse race emerged in the container scheduler space between Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos. We predict that Kubernetes will take the lead in 2017. At VMware, we're already starting to see increased interest in Kubernetes from users, vendors and the open source community, and at VMworld EMEA this year, we introduced Kubernetes as a Service on our Photon Platform. Next year, we'll see Kubernetes continue to break away from the pack with more users and production deployments and many new features that will increase its appeal to an ever-widening audience.

Containers will increasingly use virtualization technologies

• Today's containers rely on technologies built into the Linux kernel - including control groups and namespaces - to isolate containers from each other on the host machine. But a number of companies are already experimenting with using lightweight operating systems and the virtualization features baked into modern CPUs to transparently start a lightweight VM for each container that's launched. This approach could potentially increase isolation and security for containers without adding any additional overhead, and we predict you'll hear big noise around the idea in the coming year.

Container persistence technologies will mature and start seeing production use

• Thus far, most containers are "stateless" - in other words, the data inside the container is destroyed when the container instance shuts down, and any necessary application state must be stored in an external database or other form of storage service. This is largely due to the immaturity of the container persistence technologies available on the market today. However, with the advent of new capabilities like Kubernetes' PetSets, up-and-coming technologies like those from PortWorx, and our own container persistence efforts such as the Docker volume driver for vSphere, we'll soon see increased levels of maturity for container persistence, and we'll finally start seeing stateful containers in production use.

Weaveworks - http://bit.ly/2nEdOo6

C ONTAINERS AND THE ENTERPRISE

Alexis Richardson, co-founder and CEO of Weaveworks

Container Wars are over. Non-standard tools are now toast.

• Peace breaks out between rival camps as customers decide they want to run Kubernetes on Docker in a fully supported enterprise-grade stack that actually works. Everyone else moves to support this or packs their software back into their luggage. The ecosystem of dev tools, add-ons and extensions finally takes coherent shape. The OpenStack and PaaS communities explicitly endorse the emerging Cloud Native stack. Enterprise app stores begin to get traction, starting with Docker's store.

Rise of the Container Cloud

• Using the emergent Cloud Native stack, all cloud providers sell container hours, as well as VM hours. With this in place, each cloud provider takes steps to fully integrate containers with their network, security, management and data services. This makes containers into a "first class citizen" for cloud applications, and accelerates adoption by cloud customers. However, customers want more than this - Cloud Native applications that can run at scale on any infrastructure.

Cloud Native washing breaks out

• Customer demand for Cloud Native, and freedom from lock-in, leads to more solutions for enterprises that cannot move all their applications to the cloud immediately. Private enterprise application and container platform vendors fight for leadership - Docker, Pivotal and Red Hat shouting the loudest. Cloud Native follows the same hype cycle as big data and cloud before it. Meanwhile, developers ignore all this, and pick their own tools from the emerging Cloud Native landscape.

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