ISG Provider Lens™ Container Services and Solutions - Managed Container Services - U.S. 2021

Enterprises today are taking a wide variety of approaches to adopting and integrating containers into their workflows. Most start with the use of a small cluster on a developer’s personal machine, and then graduate to Hyperscale Cloud Container Services offered by one of the major public cloud vendors. Once an enterprise decides to implement containers, however, it must make a choice: will it stay with one public cloud vendor or pursue a multicloud and hybrid cloud approach? That answer will take it down markedly different paths, depending on what it decides is the right choice for its business.

Enterprises also take different philosophical views on the development of containerized software ― some want to focus technical resources on creating these next-generation applications (and plan to train or hire engineers to make that possible), while others look to the service provider community for assistance, including for full containerized software development.

No matter the approach, enterprises must make a concerted effort to truly derive value from containerizing applications, which means undergoing fairly significant cultural and organizational change. On a structural level, Kubernetes assumes that developers will be responsible for writing and maintaining containerized applications, while another team is charged with keeping the container platform up and running. This split (best characterized by Google’s Site Reliability Engineering model) is an expansion of the DevOps approach that enterprises have been adopting over the past several years. However, the incompleteness of many enterprises’ DevOps transformation, coupled with the nuances that exist between traditional application environments and containerized environments, will make this even more challenging than business leaders may expect.

Managed container services take many forms: ISG sees service providers offering a wide spectrum of managed container services to meet the equally wide range of enter­prise demands. On one end of the spectrum, a provider is just asked to come in to deploy and maintain a container platform on a client’s behalf, and the client’s employees are charged with building applications that run atop the platform. On the other end, providers are operating the platform while also building and maintaining applications that exist inside containers. There is no right or wrong approach here — just a question of where an enterprise falls on that spectrum, given its business needs.

Skills are paramount: The best providers are not only able to bring advanced skills to bear for their clients, but also help those clients evolve their approaches to software development. Leaders in this space are able to provide training resources to help clients get up to speed with what they need to know and what they need to be capable of, as part of a broader engagement.

Paid Kubernetes platforms are worth the investment: It may be tempting for enter­prises to operate their own Kubernetes platforms based on the upstream open source project, but the amount spent on maintaining those platforms would, in all likelihood, be better spent elsewhere, unless technical leadership in Kubernetes platform operation is truly a differentiator for a business. The commercially available Kubernetes platforms in the market offer useful features such as simplified management, role-based access controls and improved graphical interfaces that make them worth the expenditure.

Multi-cluster, multicloud Kubernetes platforms are the future: Enterprises using Kubernetes platforms in production need their software to handle the full breadth of pos­sible approaches to using the technology. In particular, these platforms must streamline the process of deploying and managing workloads across multiple Kubernetes clusters in different cloud environments. Even within the same cloud, ISG sees enterprises operating multiple clusters in production to help with workload isolation or address other business needs.

In addition, enterprises want to run containerized applications on environments ranging from public cloud infrastructure to embedded IoT devices. The most forward-thinking platforms are already equipped to work with these varying requirements, and the leaders in this space continue to develop their capabilities to address a wider range of needs.

Hyperscale services drive container adoption and enable use in production: Once enterprises graduate from the proof-of-concept phase with their containerized applications, they often turn to public cloud platforms’ managed container offerings for the next phase of their adoption journey. These services are powerful on-ramps to using Kubernetes and other container technologies since they help abstract away some of the complexity of deploying and managing clusters and the underlying infrastructure. Enterprises often build on their early investments with a hyperscale container platform, deploying more workloads in the cloud as they become increasingly comfortable with the services.

Many service providers offering managed container services are working with the hyperscale cloud providers and use those same services to accelerate enterprise clients’ adoption and use of Kubernetes, which further demonstrates how central those service offerings are to the overall market.

Observability is mainstream: Just a few years ago, many enterprises were not considering observability. Now, the major application performance monitoring players have integrated observability approaches into their platforms. Concurrently, dedicated observability players are being acquired by larger players or are moving into the application monitoring space. As more enterprises use containerized applications in production, the need for these tools will only grow. Furthermore, the best observability tools are able to not only work within a containerized environment, but also relate that to more traditional virtual machine-based applications.

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