A recent survey from NGINX highlighted containers and microservices are two buzzwords which are starting to enter the mainstream market as companies target daily software releases.

While daily software releases are the ultimate goal within the industry, 70% of respondents highlighted that they are currently releasing new code only once a week, with only 28% reaching target. Barriers cited were a lack of automation tools, a constant trade-off between quality of code and expected speed of delivery, as well as a lack of central management, accountability, and collaboration tools.

Containers are now seemingly beginning to enter the mainstream as 69% of respondents said that they were either actively using or investigating the technology currently. Of the 20% using containers in production, more than a third are running more than 80% of their workloads on containers and more than half for mission-critical applications. The technology is also creating a new buyer audience for vendors, as 74% of respondents said developers were responsible for choosing development and delivery tools as opposed to heads of departments or managers.

Microservices tell a slightly different story, as while adoption levels are similar at approximately 70% currently using or investigating, the trend is weighted more towards small and medium organizations rather than the blue chips. Of the larger organizations, 26% are researching, 36% are currently using in development or production however 38% aren’t using microservices at all.

The survey also demonstrated AWS are continuing to dominate market share, accounting for 49%. Despite Google and Microsoft Azure grabbing headlines recently with a number of new client wins, acquisitions and product releases, the market seemingly still favours AWS with respondents highlighting an accessible price point as one of the most important factors when selecting a cloud provider.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are becoming development best practices, as 27% of the respondents would now consider their organization to have a mature practise for continuous integration and delivery. On the other end of the scale, roughly a third said that they were keen to move forward with continuous integration and delivery but the necessary level of collaboration or understanding is not yet widespread in their organizations as of yet.

While the survey does demonstrate the integration of cloud-first technologies such as containers are moving beyond the early-adopter stage, it will be some time before such technologies become common place in large scale organizations were the wheels are slower to turn. Like the cloud business model, containers and microservices seem to be offering small and medium size operations the opportunity to compete with larger organizations budgets through technology innovation, agility and speed of deployment.