It's hard to dispute the notion that container technologies are hot right now.  But the question does remain, just how fast (and wide) is it being adopted?  

While Docker and containerization is definitely trending, adoption rates within the enterprise production market aren't moving as quickly. That segment of the market is still currently dominated by server and desktop virtualization.  But what exactly is the adoption rate?

Enter Datadog, a leading SaaS-based monitoring platform for cloud applications. Like others, the company has jumped into the container game, and even recently announced a new, dynamic platform service to be used for diagnostics and monitoring of Amazon EC2 Container Services (Amazon ECS). Datadog’s new Amazon ECS capabilities are designed for developers and sysadmins and are being used to enhance visibility into the scheduling, monitoring, and lifecycle management of Docker applications.

To dig in deeper into the world of containers, Datadog set out on a mission to sample 7,000 of its customers to find answers to some of the leading questions surrounding the mysteries of container use and its adoption rate.  According to the company, they tracked "real usage" not just anecdotally-reported usage. Keep in mind, this was a vendor created report, but the findings are no less interesting.

Datadog's findings show 8.3% of its customers are now using Docker containers. While that number alone looks small, what's really interesting is the growth rate since only a year earlier, an even smaller percentage of 1.8% of its customers had adopted the technology. That reveals a fairly significant growth rate of 5x in only 12 months.

It also shows that from almost no market share a year ago, Docker is now running on six percent of Datadog's monitored servers. Perhaps surprisingly, Datadog’s largest customers, those running 500+ hosts, were the most likely to have begun either dabbling or adopting Docker so far.

And although some of those companies eventually abandon it, the report shows that two-thirds of those that at least try Docker go on to adopt the technology. In fact, findings show that most companies who will adopt have already done so within 30 days of initial production usage, and almost all the remaining adopters convert within 60 days. And on top of that, once adopted, the average company triples its container usage between the first and sixth month of use.

The results show a host of other interesting stats worth viewing. So make sure to click on Datadog's findings to see everything. 

As stated earlier, this is a vendor driven report, so keep that in mind. Datadog also caveat's the results, saying, "Datadog's customers skew toward 'early adopters' and toward companies that take their software infrastructure seriously." All the results are therefore biased by the fact that the data comes from Datadog customers, an imperfect sample of the entire global market.

The takeaway shows that Containers are still early in the adoption lifecycle, but the numbers also show growth taking place over the last 12 months.

Keep an eye on Docker and containers. Are you using these technologies in your own company?

Click here to see the full results: https://www.datadoghq.com/docker-adoption/