451 Research: Containers A $2.7 Billion Market By 2020

Containers as a vehicle for launching applications are no flash in the pan. They are expected to penetrate the enterprise and cloud infrastructure to a much greater extent in the next three years than they have to date, turning a $495 million market in 2015 into a $2.69 billion market by the end of 2020.

Containers are currently a small portion of a set of cloud-enabling technologies followed by 451 Research, but they make up the fastest growing part with a 40% compound annual growth rate through 2020.

Those are two of the main conclusions of 451 analyst Jay Lyman, manager of container and cloud management research in his Cloud-Enabling Technologies Market Monitor report for the third quarter of 2016, which was announced as available Jan. 9.

Some critics have said containers have received an undue amount of attention in proportion to the amount of the enterprise and cloud infrastructure they occupy. But Lyman said container adoption in fact has been on a steady increase since early in 2015. At an early stage, they expanded the purposes for which they could be used, from development to testing, quality assurance, staging and production deployments.

"The time between dev and test and production is much shorter than it used to be. We see pretty strong adoption of containers for production applications," he said in an interview.

Containers are part of the accelerated software development process. They figure prominently in DevOps organizations due to their ease of modification, hand-off and migration into operations. They allow next generation applications to be produced as a series of interconnected containers. But their path into the market has been less dramatic than anticipated due to the fact they are not necessarily displacing virtual machines, as some projected they would.

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