RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise universal cloud management, today announced the results of the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Survey: DevOps Trends. The fifth annual RightScale State of the Cloud Survey was announced in February. This follow-up report provides new data and analysis in a deep dive on DevOps, Docker, and container trends. The RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report series is the result of a survey to 1,060 technology professionals at large and small enterprises across a broad cross-section of industries.

The survey results are available in the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report: DevOps Trends, which can be downloaded at www.rightscale.com/2016-devops-trends-report.

"The survey shows that the vast majority of enterprises are adopting DevOps and this usage is being driven from the bottom up by projects, teams, business units, and divisions," said Kim Weins, vice president of marketing at RightScale. "Companies are using a portfolio of DevOps technologies that include configuration management tools as well as containers. While Chef and Puppet are still the most widely used DevOps tools, Docker has seen extraordinary growth, more than doubling in the past year. Companies report a lack of experience with containers and have made educating themselves a top priority in the coming year."

Highlights of the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report: DevOps Trends include:

• DevOps is growing, especially in the enterprise: DevOps adoption increased from 66 percent in 2015 to 74 percent in 2016. DevOps adoption is strongest in the enterprise (81 percent of enterprises adopting DevOps compared to 70 percent in SMBs). Enterprises are adopting DevOps from the bottom up: Adoption of DevOps by projects or teams (29 percent) and business units or divisions (31 percent) is more common than company-wide adoption (21 percent).
• Docker usage doubles while Chef and Puppet are neck and neck: Overall, Chef, Puppet, and Docker are the top three DevOps tools used by respondents (32 percent, 32 percent, and 27 percent, respectively). Among enterprises, more use Puppet (42 percent) vs. Chef (37 percent) and Docker (29 percent). Docker is the fastest growing DevOps tool, with adoption more than doubling year-over-year from 13 percent in 2015 to 27 percent in 2016. In the enterprise, Docker also saw more than 2x growth (from 14 percent to 29 percent) while Ansible nearly tripled (from 8 percent to 23 percent). Docker could soon be the most used DevOps tool in the enterprise as 38 percent of enterprises have plans to use it. This compares to 20 percent who plan to use Chef and 19 percent who plan to use Puppet.
• DevOps users use multiple tools: Less than half (43 percent) of companies are using a configuration tool such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or Salt. Use of multiple configuration tools is more common (25 percent) than a single configuration tool (18 percent) and 67 percent of companies using Chef or Puppet also use the other tool. Configuration tools are also often used with Docker; 80 percent of Docker users also leverage at least one configuration tool.
• Container adoption is maturing, especially in enterprises: Overall, 26 percent of respondents have workloads already running in containers (8 percent in development, 18 percent in production). 36 percent of respondents are experimenting with containers, while 25 percent are learning about containers. Enterprises are using containers more than SMBs. 29 percent of enterprises have workloads running in containers versus 24 percent of SMBs, and 41 percent of enterprises are experimenting as compared to 33 percent of SMBs.
• Docker seeing greatest adoption in Europe, with tech companies, and with enterprises: Evaluating Docker adoption across different geographies, industries, and roles, RightScale found that current use of Docker is heaviest among tech organizations (32 percent), enterprises (29 percent), and developers (28 percent). Use of Docker in Europe (34 percent) is also well above average.
• Significant interest in containers on bare metal. Containers are currently being deployed primarily on virtual machines (29 percent) versus bare metal (12 percent). There is significant interest in deploying containers on bare metal with 24 percent of respondents having plans to do so in the future. Most containers are built using traditional Linux distributions such as Ubuntu (43 percent), CentOS (39 percent), and Red Hat (37 percent). CoreOS (12 percent) is the most widely adopted of the minimalist operating systems, which are designed specifically for containers.
• Biggest challenge with containers is lack of experience for newbies: For respondents who are not currently using containers, lack of experience was by far the top challenge (39 percent). The top challenges cited by respondents who are already using containers were security (29 percent) and immature technology (29 percent).
• Container focus in 2016 is education and experience: The top container initiative in 2016 will be getting more educated (62 percent), followed by conducting more experiments with containers in dev/test (44 percent) and production (28 percent), as well as expanding container use in dev/test (28 percent).