Data Availability

• The initial round of research indicates that there is a wealth of information available on this topic.

Containerization Defined

• Containerization refers to a "standard unit of software" into which code and dependencies are placed in one package, and which can run on any infrastructure.
• It is a form of operating system virtualization, that allows for applications to be run in isolated user spaces called containers using a shared operating system (OS).
• Application binaries, configuration files and dependencies, and libraries, are included in the container which is abstracted from the host operating system. This enables the application that has been containerized to run on different infrastructure without requiring a refactor.
• Containerization is differentiated from virtualization by its most distinctive feature; that it works at the OS level and not on hardware, as with virtualization.

Benefits of Containerization

• According to IBM, benefits of containerization include portability, agility, speed, fault isolation, efficiency, ease of management, security, cost savings, improved application development, and operational consistency.

The Open Container Initiative

• Established in 2015 with industry leaders, The Open Container Initiative (OCI) promotes open standards and specifications for container technology. The aim is to widen the choice for open-source engines and to eliminate specification into one type of technology. Among the technologies that are being standardized are Containerd, CoreOS rkt, Mesos Containerizer, LXC Linux Containers, OpenVZ, and crio-d.

Container Use Cases

•  Use cases for Containerization includes transferring of existing application into cloud architectures, refactoring of existing applications, the development of container-native applications, micro services architectures support, provide DevOps support for CI/CD, and more efficient deployment of repetitive tasks.
•  Additional use cases include Containers as a Service, server consolidation, multi-tenancy, and deployments of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.

Market Value

• The global application container market is expected to be worth $8.2 billion by 2025, with CAGR estimated at 26.5% over the 2019 to 2025 forecast period.

Top Market Players

•  Top players in the application container market are Oracle Solaris, Apache Mesos, Docker, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems, Google Container Engine, IBM, Pivotal Software and Red Hat.

New Product Launches

•  Alibaba launched container services Alibaba Cloud ACK Pro, ASM, ACR EE, and ACK@Edge for enterprise containers in March 2021
•  New Net Technologies launched a complete cyber security and compliance product for cloud and container environments in December 2020.

Trends

• Development trends for six of the major container technologies for 2021 according to alibabacloud.com are Kubernetes container technologies becoming the new interface for cloud, high automation of cloud-native applications, application-centered highly scalable upper-layer platforms, rapid cloud-edge integration, cloud native driven data transformation, and container security becomes a top priority.
• At Fortunesoft IT Innovations, top containerization trends for 2021 were Kubernetes, AIOps, IoT proliferation management, service mesh security for containers, stateful apps, SecOps, and DevOps.

Summary

• During the initial hour of research, the focus was placed on determining the availability of publicly available data on this subject. Once this was determined, the focus shifted to provide an overview of containerized technology which encompassed a definition, use cases, benefits, market values, top market players, and trends.
• Publicly available information supports continued investigation of this concept. As such we propose to continue the research to provide a competitive landscape for the top market players, and to develop on the trends presented in this initial report.
• The proposed research methodologies to be pursued are contained in the sections below.