This article summarises a market research report on the global and EMEA container technology landscape, originally published January 8, 2020, via Wired Release and sourced from janmorganmedia.com. Figures and forecasts below are drawn from that report’s publicly available summary.
What the Report Covers
The Global EMEA Container Technology Market report, released in early 2020, provides a structured analysis of the container technology sector across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and adjacent global regions. The study draws on primary and secondary research sources, expert interviews, data triangulation, and historical data to profile market size (in USD million), volume, revenue, and growth rates for the period 2020 to 2029.
The report is aimed at strategic planners, investors, and technology leaders who need a structured view of where container adoption is heading, who the dominant vendors are, and which application categories are driving spend.
Key Vendors Profiled
The report includes competitive profiles of the following organisations active in the container technology space:
- Apcera – container policy and orchestration platform
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Amazon ECS, EKS, and Fargate
- Chef – infrastructure automation, including container workflows
- Cisco – enterprise networking and container security integrations
- Cloud Foundry – open-source platform-as-a-service with container support
- ClusterHQ – container data management (note: ceased operations in 2016)
- CoreOS – container-optimised Linux and rkt runtime (acquired by Red Hat in 2018)
- Docker – the dominant container runtime and toolchain
- EMC – storage and data management for containerised workloads
- HashiCorp – Nomad, Vault, Consul for container scheduling and secrets management
- Joyent – SmartOS-based container infrastructure
- Mesosphere (now D2iQ) – DC/OS and Kubernetes enterprise platform
- Microsoft – Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Windows container support
- OpenStack – open-source cloud infrastructure with Magnum container service
- Rackspace – managed cloud and container hosting services
Market Segments by Container Runtime Type
The report categorises the market by the underlying container runtime technology:
- Docker – the most widely deployed container runtime, using the OCI-compatible containerd engine
- rkt (Rocket) – CoreOS’s pod-native container engine, now archived
- LXC and LXD – Linux system containers providing a lightweight VM-like experience
- containerd – the CNCF-graduated container runtime now embedded in Docker and Kubernetes
- FreeBSD Jails – OS-level virtualisation predating Linux containers
- Others – including gVisor, Kata Containers, and proprietary runtimes
Market Segments by Application Area
On the application side, the report breaks spend and adoption into five functional categories:
- Container Monitoring – observability tooling for resource usage, health checks, and alerting across container fleets
- Container Provisioning – orchestration, scheduling, and lifecycle management (e.g., Kubernetes, Nomad)
- Container Security – image scanning, runtime policy enforcement, and secrets management
- Container Data Management – persistent storage, volume management, and backup for stateful containerised workloads
- Container Networking – CNI plugins, service meshes, ingress controllers, and network policy enforcement
Regional Breakdown
Despite the “EMEA” label, the report covers all major global regions:
| Region | Countries Included |
|---|---|
| Asia-Pacific | China, India, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Western Asia |
| Middle East & Africa | South Africa, North Africa, GCC countries |
| North America | United States, Canada, Mexico |
| Europe | Germany, UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey |
| South America | Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru |
Key Questions the Report Addresses
For DevOps teams and engineering leaders evaluating container strategy, the research is structured around questions such as:
- What are the primary growth drivers, opportunities, and risks in the container technology market?
- Which consumer or enterprise segment drove the highest container technology sales in 2020?
- What business risks and regulatory factors affect market growth?
- Which application categories (monitoring, security, networking, etc.) show the highest growth potential?
- Which geographic region presents the most immediate commercial opportunity?
- Which container runtime types are seeing the greatest enterprise adoption?
- What are the primary challenges — skills gaps, security concerns, storage complexity — facing adopters?
Report Structure
The full report table of contents includes the following sections:
- Market Overview and Size Estimation
- Manufacturer and Vendor Profiles
- Competitive Landscape by Key Company
- Regional Analysis (Global, EMEA, North America, Asia-Pacific)
- Country-Level Breakdowns for South America, Middle East, and Africa
- Market Segmentation by Runtime Type
- Market Segmentation by Application Category
- Market Forecast: 2020–2029
- Research Conclusions and Recommendations
Context for DevOps Practitioners
Market research reports like this one are most useful to practitioners when mapped against real technology decisions. A few contextual notes worth keeping in mind when interpreting a 2020-vintage container market study:
- Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestrator. By 2020, Kubernetes had consolidated its position as the dominant container orchestration platform, making orchestration choice less of a market differentiator and shifting competition to the management, security, and developer experience layers.
- Some listed vendors no longer exist in their original form. ClusterHQ ceased operations in 2016; CoreOS was acquired by Red Hat (now IBM) in 2018; Apcera was acquired by Ericsson and later wound down. Treat vendor lists in older reports with caution.
- Container security became a top-tier concern. The period 2020–2024 saw significant growth in image scanning tools, supply-chain security standards (SLSA, SBOM), and runtime security products — trends that a 2020 forecast may have underweighted.
- Serverless containers grew substantially. AWS Fargate, Google Cloud Run, and Azure Container Apps changed the provisioning segment significantly after this report was written.
Source: janmorganmedia.com / Wired Release, January 8, 2020. Original report covers the global EMEA Container Technology market for the period 2020–2029.