This article is based on reporting originally published at ZDNet and draws on data from Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud Report (formerly the RightScale State of the Cloud Report), which surveyed 750 IT executives in Q1 2020.
Containers and Cloud: A Natural Partnership
Containers have become a cornerstone of modern application development and deployment. Their value proposition is well understood: they package an application and its dependencies into a portable unit that can run consistently across development laptops, on-premises servers, and multiple cloud environments. This portability is especially important as enterprises pursue hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, moving workloads between providers or between cloud and on-premises infrastructure without costly re-engineering.
But building and operating a mature containerized environment at scale is not trivial. It requires specialized expertise in orchestration, networking, storage, security, and CI/CD pipelines. That skills gap has created real friction for organizations that want the benefits of containers without investing heavily in building internal platform teams from scratch.
What Is Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS)?
Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) is a managed cloud service model that abstracts the underlying infrastructure required to run containers. Rather than provisioning and maintaining the orchestration layer — including the control plane, node management, networking, and storage — organizations consume these capabilities as a managed service from a cloud provider or platform vendor.
CaaS sits between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Users retain significant control over how their containers are configured and deployed, but they offload operational responsibility for the underlying container runtime and orchestration platform. In practice, this usually means a managed Kubernetes service, a managed Docker environment, or both.
Common CaaS offerings from major cloud providers include:
- AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
CaaS Adoption Is Rising Fast
According to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, CaaS is no longer a niche offering. Among the 750 IT executives surveyed, 53 percent reported using CaaS — placing it as the second-ranked PaaS category in use among cloud-driven enterprises, up from sixth place the previous year. Only Database-as-a-Service ranked higher, used by 62 percent of respondents.
In terms of year-over-year growth, CaaS ranked second among the fastest-growing cloud technologies, with 17 percent annual growth — just behind IoT services at 21 percent and level with machine learning and AI services.
Adoption of specific CaaS products reflects this trend:
- AWS ECS/EKS: 54 percent adoption (up from 44 percent the prior year), with another 24 percent planning adoption.
- Azure Container Service: 46 percent adoption (up from 28 percent).
- Google Kubernetes Engine: 24 percent adoption (up from 15 percent).
The survey authors attribute this acceleration to organizations’ growing interest in leveraging containers to speed deployment, scale operations, and increase workload efficiency in the cloud.
Why CaaS Matters: Balancing Speed and Control
One of the key value propositions of CaaS is that it preserves developer and operations control over container configuration while reducing the burden of managing the platform itself. As noted in an overview by Eric Olsson at Scalyr, the evolution toward containers is part of a broader acceleration in software delivery:
“Agile methodologies shortened the development and testing pieces while cloud computing has shortened the deployment piece. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) further improved the time it takes to get a feature to customers. In addition to these, containers can give you a more powerful and flexible solution. But with all these pieces come additional configuration and complexity.”
Eric Olsson, Scalyr
CaaS helps manage that added complexity by delivering a pre-integrated platform for container orchestration, allowing teams to focus on writing and shipping software rather than maintaining Kubernetes clusters.
Key Challenges Slowing Container Adoption
Despite growing adoption, the Flexera survey identified several significant barriers that organizations still face when working with containers:
- Lack of internal expertise: Cited as a major challenge by 41 percent of respondents, with another 38 percent calling it a moderate challenge. Container orchestration, security, and networking require skills that many teams are still building.
- Migrating traditional applications: 34 percent identified this as a major issue. Containers are optimized for microservices architectures, while many existing enterprise applications are monolithic and were not designed with container portability in mind. Retrofitting these applications requires significant refactoring effort.
- Security concerns: Also cited as a major challenge by 34 percent. Container security encompasses image scanning, runtime protection, secrets management, and network policy — all areas requiring deliberate investment.
- Provider expertise gaps: More than one in four respondents (26 percent) noted that even their service providers lack sufficient expertise in container technology, suggesting that the ecosystem as a whole is still maturing.
The survey authors note that these challenges largely reflect the relative recency of widespread container adoption. As the tooling, training, and managed service options mature, many of these barriers are expected to lower.
Docker and Kubernetes Remain the Foundation
Underlying most containerization efforts are two technologies that have become de facto standards in the industry. According to the Flexera 2020 survey:
- Docker: Used by 65 percent of organizations surveyed, with another 14 percent planning adoption. Docker remains the dominant container runtime and image format.
- Kubernetes: Used by 58 percent of organizations, with 22 percent planning to adopt it. Kubernetes has become the leading container orchestration platform, and most CaaS offerings — including EKS, AKS, and GKE — are built on top of it.
The widespread use of these open-source technologies means that organizations investing in CaaS today are building on a well-supported, vendor-neutral foundation, which reduces lock-in risk compared with proprietary PaaS platforms.
Is CaaS the Right Choice for Your Organization?
CaaS is not a universal solution, but it is a pragmatic one for many organizations. Teams that are beginning their container journey and do not yet have deep Kubernetes expertise can use a managed CaaS offering to get running quickly, then build operational knowledge progressively. Organizations with strong platform engineering teams may prefer more control over their Kubernetes deployment, running self-managed clusters on IaaS infrastructure.
For enterprises running hybrid or multi-cloud workloads, CaaS offerings can also provide a consistent developer experience across environments — particularly when combined with tools like Helm, Terraform, or GitOps workflows that standardize deployments across providers.
The central question is not whether to use containers — at this point, the industry trend is clear — but how much of the operational platform you want to manage yourself versus delegate to a cloud provider. CaaS represents a sensible middle path for most enterprises: enough abstraction to reduce operational burden, enough control to maintain flexibility.
Conclusion
Containers have moved from an advanced practice to a mainstream enterprise requirement, and CaaS is emerging as the practical delivery mechanism for organizations that want container benefits without standing up their own orchestration infrastructure. Adoption data from the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report confirms that CaaS is growing rapidly, driven by real demand across enterprises of all sizes. Challenges around expertise and application migration remain, but the managed service model is helping lower the barrier to entry — and that trend is likely to continue as Docker, Kubernetes, and the broader cloud-native ecosystem continue to mature.