[DZone Research] Benefits and Difficulties Inherent in Containers

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the 2018 DZone Guide to Containers: Development and Management.

Introduction

For our 2018 DZone Guide to Containers, we surveyed 711 software professionals, asking a range of questions related to the topic of containers. In this article, we take a look at the benefits of containers in the development process that these developers reported, as well as difficulties and roadblocks that pop up during container adoption. 

Container Benefits: We Can't Contain Our Excitement

A major selling point of container technology is that it makes development less frustrating. When asked about their expectations prior to using containers, 82% of respondents told us that they expected containers to make their jobs easier. So, did containers live up to the hype? When we asked our audience, "Have containers made your job easier or harder?", a resounding 75% told us that containers have indeed made their jobs easier, with only 7% stating this technology made development tasks harder.

What is it about containers that makes them so widely popular? The answer boils down to three major benefits. Respondents stated that faster deployment time (77%) was the biggest benefit of containers, followed by enhanced scalability when building applications (75%), and greater modularity (64%). And, as developers gain more experience with containers, these benefits only seem to increase. In our 2017 Containers survey, 56% of respondents reported faster deployment as a benefit (a year-over-year growth rate of 21%), and 53% reported scalability as a plus (which corresponds to a 22% growth in this year's survey). Interestingly, despite the prominence of Java developers among the DZone community (82% of respondents to this survey work for organizations that employ the Java ecosystem), the percentage of Java developers who claimed faster deployment (27% of Java devs), scalability (36% of Java devs), and modularity (31% of Java devs) as benefits lagged behind coders from other language ecosystems. The language ecosystems that derive the most benefit from the use of containers, as stated by the responses, tended to be Python, Node.js, and Ruby.

Container Drawbacks: Developer Experience 

As stated earlier, despite the large-scale popularity of containers, and the benefits of faster deployment, scalability, and modularity for a multitude of language ecosystems, 25% of organizations are still not using containers and 18% are only considering adopting them. To understand why some organizations chose not to adopt container technology, let’s look at the challenges containers presented to those who have adopted them, the apparent challenges present for those considering adopting containers, and the reasons why some organizations and developers have decided not to adopt container technology.

The biggest impediment reported by containers users (56%) is a lack of developer experience with this technology. Interestingly, when we compare this concern with organizational size, we see that the larger the organization, the bigger the concern over lack of developer experience with containers. 32% of respondents working for organizations sized 100-999 employees consider this a major obstacle and 25% of respondents working for organizations with 1,000-9,999 employees worry about developer experience with containers. Other oft-reported challenges among container adopters were refactoring/re-architecting legacy applications (50%) and application performance monitoring (33%). Though, again, as development teams gain more experience with container technology, these problems are becoming less of an issue. In last year's survey, 68% reported developer experience as a major challenge, and 70% reported refactoring/re-architecting legacy applications as an issue. Thus, it appears that while enterprise-level software teams are still learning how to best use containers, they are quickly adapting.

Of those respondents whose companies are still deliberating on the use of containers, a lack of developer experience with containers was the largest concern, chosen by 71%. The second largest challenge reported among this group was refactoring/re-architecting legacy applications (70%), followed, in a distant third, by application performance monitoring (38%). Here again, we see concern among enterprise-level developers about containers, as 23% of those reporting refactoring legacy applications work for organizations with 100-999 employees, 25% for organizations with 1,000-9,999 employees, and 17% for organizations with 10,000 or more employees. Among those organizations that have chosen not to adopt containers, 48% report lack of developer experience as a primary concern and 24% stated that refactoring/rearchitecting legacy applications was a concern. The only organizations for which ensuring application and network security was a deal breaker were those sized 1,000-9,999 employees, with 21% of respondents who work for such organizations reporting thusly.

Conclusion

The benefits reported in our findings point toward the use of containers in a DevOps environment. With speed of deployment and the ability to quickly scale becoming cornerstones of the DevOps movement, as the DevOps methodology continues to gain in popularity, so too will containers.  

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the 2018 DZone Guide to Containers: Development and Management.