I don’t usually read too much into vendor surveys and statistics. Check this out to find out why. But this one helps put the craze about application containers in perspective.
Datadog is a company that monitors IT infrastructure and it has some interesting statistics about how its 7,000 customers are using containers. Here’s a hint: It’s still early on for this market.
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Datadog said that 8.3% of its customers are using Docker containers today. That’s obviously not a lot. But it is a lot more than it was last year when only 1.8% of users had deployed Docker. Datadog’s largest customers, those running 500+ hosts, were the most likely to have begun either dabbling or adopting Docker thusfar.
The company has some other interesting stats too, such as that once users start playing around with Docker containers their use increases rapidly. In the first five months of using Docker containers, the average customer has a 5x growth in the number of containers on their hosts.
Datadog admits that its customers may be best classified as early adopters, and folks who take infrastructure monitoring seriously. So, take the data with a grain of salt. The takeaway is that it’s obviously early days, but Docker container use does seem to be picking up. Check out more info on Docker from Datadog here.