What We Learned from the Gartner Forecast Analysis: Container Management (Software and Services), Worldwide

In June 2020, Kubernetes celebrated its 6th birthday. In just a few short years, Kubernetes has become the dominant technology employed to manage clusters and their container-based applications. Not only that, the number of clusters under management keeps growing. In a recent survey, it was reported that 45% of companies were now managing multiple clusters and that is expected to grow by double digits next year.

More clusters means more management overhead and thus it’s critical to pick the right Kubernetes management strategy for your company. Without that, you can be locked into limitations of certain technologies, business-critical application deployment can be delayed and future operational costs can skyrocket out of control.

Gartner published its Forecast Analysis: Container Management (Software and Services), Worldwide (Gartner Subscription required), written by Michael Warrilow, which helps us understand the demand for container management.

In the report, Gartner predicts, “Growing adoption of cloud-native applications and infrastructure will increase use of container management to over 75% of large enterprises in mature economies by 2024 (up from less than 35% in 2020)”. The report continues to say that, “Although attached revenue is explicitly excluded from this forecast, the IaaS revenue associated with container management is expected to reach $1 billion before 2022”. That’s tremendous growth in just 4 short years, especially given the budget constraints most companies are experiencing due to COVID-19.

That said, Gartner also predicts that, “Up to 15% of enterprise applications will run in a container environment by 2024, up from less than 5% in 2020, hampered by application backlog, technical debt and budget constraints”.

Although this 200% increase prediction in just 4 years is impressive, many verticals are adopting containers a lot faster than others. The high-tech and banking sectors, for example, are adopting containers across the board to speed up feature delivery to their customers.

I’m sure I’m speaking for other container management vendors by saying we believe a growing container management market has only just begun.