Docker software containers are seeing increased enterprise adoption at the expense of older virtualization technology platforms, according to a new survey from bare-metal container company Diamanti Inc.

The company, which quizzed 576 information technology leaders for its newly published 2018 Container Adoption Benchmark survey, found that enterprises are mostly shifting to containers in order to save money on virtualization platforms sold by companies such as VMware Inc.

Software containers are proving popular not only because they cost less to run, but also because they help to make development process easier and more agile. Benefits include the ability to push out updates faster and build apps just once that can run on any platform.

Diamanti said 44 percent of companies are planning to replace some of their virtual machines with containers in the next 12 months. Almost half added they plan to deploy containers in production, with 12 percent saying they’ve already done so.

One of the main reasons enterprise are dumping their virtual machines is the high price of VM licensing fees from companies such as VMware. According to the survey, 55 percent of respondents saying they currently pay more than $100,000 annually for VMware licensing fees, while 34 percent spend more than $250,000 a year.

That finding may or may not alarm VMware, but in truth it probably isn’t a surprise, since that company has already taken steps in expectation of the shift toward containers. These measures include fusing containers with its own virtualization platforms, expanding into OpenStack and more recently partnering with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on hybrid cloud.

Other findings from Diamanti’s survey show that Docker and Kubernetes are the most widely adopted container technologies, used by 52 percent and 30 percent of respondents, respectively. And there was a bit of good news for VMware too, with 71 percent of enterprises saying they’ve deployed containers on a VM, which is a sign that technology is unlike to disappear completely any time soon.

“Enterprises have made substantial capital investments in virtualization and have years of experience managing virtual machines, so it’s natural that they would consider running containers within their existing virtualized environment,” said Jeff Chou, cofounder and chief executive officer of Diamanti. “But the early adopters who run containers on virtual machines have experienced additional management complexity, lower utilization and efficiency, and dramatically reduced performance. Plus, running more virtual machines means more VMware licensing costs.”

As for use cases, most companies are primarily adopting them in order to run next-generation cloud-native apps. Some 54 percent said this was their main reason for using containers, with other use cases including running lightweight stateless apps (39 percent) and cloud migrations (32 percent).

Diamanti’s survey also highlighted some of the problems early adopters of containers are facing. Asked to cite their “greatest challenge” regarding containers, 30 percent of respondents cited infrastructure problems, followed by deployment (22 percent), security (22 percent), performance (19 percent) and persistent storage (12 percent).

Image: Diamanti