As newsletter subscribers may recall, we’ve been talking internally at 451 about how service providers could use Docker, or not. The piece on that topic is now up, and free for all to view to boot. Here’s the 451 Take:
Given the gulf between the actual needs of application stacks and the ability of modern hardware to pool physical resources, there is an opportunity for providers to move IaaS forward for developers. However, it requires commercial container vendors (Parallels) to tune their products toward delivering open-ended environments for users to bring their own applications, or it requires providers to blend IaaS with containerization to varying levels of sophistication on their own. Cloud computing succeeds because it is better at getting the consumer access to computing power than the alternative. In this case, developers are the consumer, and developers do not want to deal with every part of an operating system or systems concerns outside of their application. Developers happily pay low-cost providers $5 or $10 a month for a VM. If providers can give them superior service in the form of VM-less, stateful and container-ready environments they control for 1/10th the cost of production, this could shake up the cloud business, just as cloud shook up hosting before it. No more virtual machines, only apps.
Carl Brooks did most of the heavy lifting here as he knows service providers (and existing containers-ish competitors like Parallels better than me.
Obviously, since “developers” are my hammer, it’s nice that yet again Docker is a handy nail. Part of the reason I wrote that “big ass report” on developer relations was to help education service and cloud providers about the importance of developers and how to reach them. It’s nails all the way down!
Cloud, obviously a big opportunity if you know how to target
In our surveys, we see a sudden shift to private, public, and the infamous “hybrid cloud,” as the chart above shows (from this 451 report). Folks are looking for technologies and places to run their apps, which is exciting and will create opportunity for lots of cloud and service providers if they know what and who to target. There’s some recent 451 survey work that’s study the toolchain needed and buyer’s plans for putting them in place which is nice and detailed here as well.