Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Alex Rosemblat, Director of Marketing, Datadog
2015: The year of the container wars
2014 will be remembered as the year of container. Few outside of
the most "bleeding edge" circles had heard of Docker at this time last year.
Yet today, Docker is the hottest technology on the market. However, Docker's
market offering has begun to splinter into a number of directions, as the
project's current ambitions have caused significant scope creep. Other entrants
are already beginning to make moves to capitalize on the container demand that
Docker has created. This trend will only increase: 2015 will be the year of the
container wars.
Docker initially started as an evolution of previous open source
containerization projects. By developing additional "glue" components that
allowed for containers to be used in an accessible, prod-ready fashion, Docker
lit the match for the container market. Because there's little money to be made
solely off of containers, an open-source commodity, Docker recently began developing
management components such as Docker Hub Enterprise and working with large
platform vendors like Microsoft, VMware, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web
Services to develop tailored offshoots that could be more directly monetized.
These efforts however divert Docker from their previously singular
focus on developing the underlying container engine. In an opening salvo for
2015's container war, one of Docker's early adopters, CoreOS, released their
own container project "Rocket". This was accompanied by claims that they were
motivated to do so because of loss of faith in Docker's direction. Other
potential entrants, like the stealth startup Bracket Computing, seem to be
gearing up to get into the container game armed with over $85M of venture
funding!
2015 will see increasing competition in the containerization
space. Aside from growth in the projects from the nimble startups mentioned
above (and likely more to come), the changes in infrastructure that containers
enable could threaten large incumbent firms such as VMware and Red Hat. Such
companies may create their own container projects as a hedge. Other large
players looking to create a marquee product to further advance into the cloud
market such as HP, Oracle and IBM could see a new containerization initiative
as their best chance to make a big move.
Ultimately for the broader
market, this will add a multitude of options and challenges for organizations
that choose to take the container route. It will be difficult to choose a
container vendor, as these projects will evolve quickly until market needs
stabilize. Also, availability of performance instrumentation, configuration
management, and all of the support tools needed to get a new platform
production-ready will become key enablers for each container project. Vendors
of these tools will have to develop quickly to keep up with the innovation
coming out of the "container wars."
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About the Author
Alex Rosemblat is Director of Marketing at Datadog. Previous to Datadog,
Alex served as the Product Marketer for Dell’s Cloud and Virtualization
product family (via the acquisition of VKernel), bringing to market
virtualization management and cloud monitoring software products. Alex
has several years of experience with enterprise software and related
technologies through product management, IT consulting, and pre-sales
engineering with Symantec (via the acquisition of SwapDrive) and Epic
Systems Corporation. He holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Commerce,
specializing in IT, from the University of Virginia and an MBA from the
MIT Sloan School of Management.