Enterprises across Europe are turning to container technology to create fast and flexible software applications, with many using providers to help overcome technical and cultural challenges, according to a new report published by Information Services Group, a leading global technology research and advisory firm.
The 2021 ISG Provider Lens Container Services and Solutions Report for Europe finds companies across the region embracing containers as a way to efficiently upgrade applications and scale resources to meet business demand.
“European enterprises see containerized solutions, including Kubernetes, as crucial to enabling platform versatility,” said Heiko Henkes, director, ISG Provider Lens Research. “As a general-purpose technology, containers can be deployed across on-premises data centers, workstations, cloud and, increasingly, edge and internet-of-things devices.”
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The report sees the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the demand for container technology in Europe. With the dramatic shift to remote working and online consumption, the demand for cloud-native services and container solutions has increased. Music streaming, food delivery, home exercise, and finance are some of the online services that have deployed Kubernetes to manage the rise in demand.
Adopting container technology, however, can come with several technical, human, and cultural challenges, the report adds. Containers can bring new security risks, and with companies often deploying thousands of container clusters across cloud and on-premises data centers, observability can be a concern. Enterprises want to know what is going on within and between containers and identify where there might be degradation of service or a potential problem emerging.
Finding the right mix of observability tools and solutions—from traditional log monitoring and fault tracing to newer tools such as pseudo transactions, remote telemetry, and chaos engineering—is essential given the growing complexity of containers and their supporting ecosystem, the report says. Some European companies are turning to container observability solution providers to deal with this issue.
However, the biggest challenges to adopting container technology are often human and cultural in nature, the report says. Containers and Kubernetes represent not just a new set of technologies, but a different philosophy of how to manage enterprise IT, involving reliance on a complex ecosystem of open-source and commercial partners, and a blurring of traditional lines between development, operations, and security.
Many enterprises in Europe seek commercial solutions and providers that can ease the implementation process of the Kubernetes container technology and provide additional service layers on top, the report says. Many companies turn to hyperscalers for a full suite of infrastructure and specific Kubernetes tools, while others look to traditional IT service providers and global system integrators for legacy migrations and managed services using containers.
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The report also sees growing demand in Europe for service providers located within the region or with a major footprint there. European data sovereignty and data residency requirements will impact container service providers, and many of them are developing container management and Kubernetes solutions designed to address complex data location and access rules.
Meanwhile, many companies in Europe are seeing a shortage of in-house cloud and Kubernetes talent, the report says. In some cases, companies are either creating their own on-the-job training programs or are turning to service providers to help train employees in container-related skills.
The 2021 ISG Provider Lens Container Services and Solutions Report for Europe evaluates the capabilities of 55 providers across four quadrants: Managed Container Services, Kubernetes Platform Services, Hyperscaler Cloud Container Platforms, and Cloud-Native Observability Solutions.
The report names Accenture, Atos, AWS, Cognizant, Datadog, Dynatrace, Google Cloud, HCL, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, Mirantis, New Relic, Oracle, Rancher (SUSE), Red Hat, Splunk, Sysdig, VMware, and Wipro as Leaders in one quadrant.
In addition, Claranet, Kubermatic, and OVHcloud were named Rising Stars—companies with “promising portfolios” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition—in one quadrant each.
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