Anchore 2016 Container Technology Survey: Adoption, Security, CI/CD, Orchestration, and OS Trends

At the end of 2016, a year‑end review of container technology was presented, summarizing a foreign (Anchore) survey that gives a comprehensive picture of container adoption and usage trends worldwide.

The survey collected data from respondents across many fields, covering container planning and usage, management tools, operating systems, CI tools, and security, with a particular focus on containers and CI.

User Distribution Sixty percent of respondents work at companies with more than 100 employees, spanning a variety of roles.

Container Technology Usage Classification About one‑third of users run containers in production, with an even higher share using them for development.

Security Becomes a Barrier Security is a major concern; the survey shows a stark contrast between security strategies chosen for production versus non‑production environments.

Companies with custom security policies are more likely to run containers in production, yet senior developers often neglect security and compliance details.

CI/CD CI/CD is essential for cloud‑native workflows; Jenkins (including its commercial version CloudBees) accounts for roughly 50% of tool usage.

Survey respondents report a higher level of CI/CD adoption compared with other areas.

Container Orchestration Tools The market is dominated by Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, with Kubernetes slightly ahead. For analysis, Red Hat OpenShift and CoreOS Tectonic represent Kubernetes, while Apache Mesos and Mesosphere represent Mesos.

Mesos remains architecturally strong and is often chosen for big‑data environments.

Host Operating Systems Ubuntu leads as the primary host OS for containers, followed by Amazon Linux (driven by ECS growth) and Alpine Linux (reflecting Docker on macOS).

Among the top five host OSs, Ubuntu dominates among developers and architects.

Professional OS usage is rising; CoreOS leads, while Alpine continues to grow.

Container Image Operating Systems Containers simplify application stacks, but many still opt for full‑OS images. The majority of respondents choose complete OS images, with Ubuntu again first, followed by CentOS and RHEL.

While full OS images simplify development and deployment, they raise operational, security, and compliance challenges; developers often rely on CVE scores alone, which is insufficient.

Author: fryan Original link: http://redmonk.com/fryan/2016/12/01/containers-in-production-is-security-a-barrier-a-dataset-from-anchore/