Containers are well regarded for the flexibility they add to application development and deployment, especially when it comes to moving application workloads between clouds, between clouds and on-premises systems, or even from one on-premises system to another. However, effectively building a complex containerized environment still takes skills and experience. Enter Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS)[1], a variation of Platform-as-a-Service that has been around as a concept for a few years, and lately is being embraced in a big way to speed up container adoption.
So, is CaaS just another "as-a-Service" term from vendors intended to confuse the market and wrap their offerings in some glorious-sounding "aaSy" package? Or is there more to it?
The data suggests CaaS may be serving a righteous purpose. The latest survey of 750 IT executives from Flexera's 2020 State of the Cloud Report[2] (originally launched by Rightscale), finds a majority of cloud adopters, 53 percent, also use CaaS, which is on the upswing as containers become a mainstream part of enterprise development and operations environments. Notably, CaaS is now the second-ranked Platform-as-a-Service offering now in use among cloud-driven enterprises, up from sixth place in last year's survey. Database-as-a-Service tops this year's list with 62 percent. "Organizations are driving this shift due to their growing interest in leveraging containers to speed deployment, scale operations, and increase the efficiency of workloads running in the cloud," the survey's authors state.
In terms of fastest-growing technologies, CaaS ranked second with 17 percent year-over-year growth, right behind IoT services at 21 percent. Another fast-growing category, machine learning and artificial intelligence, also saw 17 percent annual growth.
Overall, the survey, conducted in the first quarter of 2020, finds rising adoption of public and hybrid cloud solutions, with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud taking significant