TNS Research: Help Us Understand Container Orchestration
We need your help to better understand the emerging practice of container orchestration.
In preparation for an upcoming eBook on the subject, we are delving deeply into how organizations are coordinating their container operations. Thus far in our preliminary investigations, we found little agreement about what an orchestration product does. Is it limited to service discovery, scheduling and cluster management? Are Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesos comparable? Where do PaaS offerings (e.g., OpenShift, Deis, CloudFoundry) or configuration management tools like Chef, Ansible and Puppet fit in?
So we put together a survey for both users and vendors to find out what others think container orchestration actually means? The survey is anonymous and the results will be publicly available, so participate now. Both vendors and end users are asked some of the questions, but we did make an attempt to screen out people that are selling container-related services. The following are the questions being asked of enterprise IT end users:
- How far along is your company in adopting containers?
- What functionality do you expect to be in a product described as a container orchestration tool?
- What functionality do you expect to be in something described as Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS)?
- What is your primary job role?
And for those using or doing hands-on evaluation of containers, we’ll ask:
- What do you use for container cluster management?
- What do you use for scheduling for containers?
- What tools do you use to do service discovery for containers?
- What is the primary way that containers are managed or orchestrated in your organization?
- Orchestration Platform (e.g., Swarm, Kubernetes)
- Containers as a Service (e.g., EC2 Elastic Container Service, Joyent Triton Elastic Container Service, Docker Datacenter)
- Platform as a Service (OpenShift, Deis)
- Cloud Orchestration or IaaS Configuration (e.g., AWS CloudFormation, Cloudify)
- Configuration Management Tools (e.g., Chef, Ansible, Puppet Labs)
- We use shell scripts and/or customizations to integrate multiple tools.
- We use containers but we do not manage orchestrated containers.
- Within the next year, what are the top three products or services you expect to utilize to manage or orchestrate containers?
- When evaluating container orchestration tools, how important are the following requirements?
- Integrated tooling for both developers and IT ops
- Addresses the full application lifecycle
- Supports multiple operating systems
- Supports wide range of language stacks and frameworks
- Plugs into wide range of infrastructure providers for compute, networking and storage
- Integration with existing systems for logging, monitoring or identity management
- When evaluating container orchestration tools, how important are the orchestration abilities to do the following?
- Non-containerized workloads
- Batch applications
- Long-running applications
- Persistent storage
- Load balancing
- How many hosts are in your company’s IT infrastructure?
If you have a moment, please take the time to fill out our survey. Together, we will bring clarity to the field of container orchestration.
Feature image by Dmitrii Vaccinium, via Unsplash.
