451 Research on Free Software at the Back End

The move to microservices and open technologies like containers, Docker and Kubernetes in particular, are helping businesses package up their legacy applications and put them in the cloud.

Recent estimates from 451 Research noted that the container market, even in the early days of the space, suggested enormous growth, with application containers set to become a $2.7 billion (€2.35 billion) market by 2020.

The 451 Research report can probably be considered a conservative estimation now, with Docker driving forward its pivot to the enterprise, and considering the popularity of the Google-born Kubernetes container orchestration system, the cash value of the market probably does not reflect usage.

Not only is Kubernetes adoption growing quickly in the developer world, it is also increasingly informing major enterprise purchasing decisions (see investment – below) such as VMware buying Heptio for a cool half billion dollars.

There were some interesting developments at the Openstack Foundation in the container space too, with the Intel, and Huawei, backed Kata containers release, which act like lightweight VMs, wrapped with an additional layer of security.

In “OpenStack: Enabler of Digital Transformation—How Service Providers Can Benefit,” 451 Research speaks directly to some of the concerns you as a service provider probably have, such as utilization rates and scale, when you think of standing up a private cloud for your customers. Your business thrives when you can automate services for your customers, and OpenStack can help. Of course, because OpenStack is an open source technology, you could go the route of downloading the software and setting it up yourself, from scratch—but that will likely involve a lot of DIY work.

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The paper also outlines four main challenges service providers will face when using an open source cloud management platform (CMP) such as OpenStack to set up a private cloud for customers, and shares a few thoughts on facing down those challenges: