This article is based on survey data originally reported by containerjournal.com, referencing a study conducted by ClearPath Strategies on behalf of the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF).
The Headline Finding: Containers Are Moving Faster Than DevOps
A survey of 601 IT decision-makers, conducted by ClearPath Strategies on behalf of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, revealed a notable shift in enterprise technology adoption priorities: container adoption is on pace to overtake DevOps adoption within two years.
At the time of the survey, 32 percent of respondents had already adopted both containers and DevOps processes. Looking forward 12 months, 25 percent planned to adopt or evaluate containers, compared to only 17 percent planning the same for DevOps. Projected out to a two-year horizon, 72 percent of respondents said they already use or expect to use containers, versus 66 percent who said the same about DevOps.
What remains less clear from the data is whether widespread container adoption will push organizations toward DevOps as a cultural and operational practice — or whether the two trends will continue to evolve independently.
Where Container Adoption Actually Stands
The survey breaks container adoption into three tiers:
- 18 percent have broadly adopted containers across their organization.
- 40 percent have deployed containers on a limited basis.
- 40 percent are still in the early stages of evaluation or pilot.
This distribution is a useful reminder that headline adoption figures often mask significant variation in deployment maturity. An organization running containers in a single team’s CI pipeline is counted alongside one running Kubernetes clusters in production at scale.
Platform Pluralism: PaaS, Containers, and Serverless Together
One of the more telling findings is that IT organizations are no longer picking a single application delivery model. Instead, many are running multiple paradigms in parallel:
- 64 percent report using both PaaS and containers.
- 43 percent report using both PaaS and serverless.
- 42 percent report using both containers and serverless.
- 39 percent report using all three: PaaS, containers, and serverless simultaneously.
For engineering teams, this platform pluralism has real operational implications. Infrastructure and platform teams must now support toolchains, security policies, networking models, and observability pipelines that span fundamentally different runtime environments. Standardizing on a common control plane — whether that is Kubernetes, a managed cloud platform, or a PaaS layer — becomes critical as the number of runtime models grows.
Serverless: Evaluations Outpace Production Use
Serverless computing shows a striking gap between interest and production deployment. Only 11 percent of respondents were actively using serverless frameworks at the time of the survey, yet 35 percent were evaluating at least one. This mirrors the early trajectory of containers themselves — broad curiosity, limited production footprint.
For DevOps practitioners, this signals that serverless will increasingly appear in team backlogs and architecture discussions even if production usage remains concentrated in early adopters. Understanding the operational tradeoffs of serverless — cold starts, vendor lock-in, observability gaps, per-invocation cost modeling — is becoming baseline knowledge rather than specialist knowledge.
Cloud-Native Is the Direction, Not Just the Destination
CFF CTO Chip Childers, commenting on the survey results, drew a distinction that matters for how engineering leaders frame their modernization strategies: the benefits of cloud technologies are only fully realized when applications are either purpose-built for or genuinely modernized for cloud platforms. A simple lift-and-shift — moving an existing application to a VM in the cloud without architectural changes — captures very little of the operational or economic value.
The survey data supports this framing. More than half of IT decision-makers (57 percent) reported that their organizations are both building new cloud-native applications and refactoring existing ones. Only 13 percent are relying on refactoring alone.
PaaS vs. CaaS: A Division That Is Already Blurring
One question the survey raises but does not definitively answer is how the market will divide between Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments and Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) environments. At the time this data was published, PaaS platforms were already absorbing container orchestration technologies — Kubernetes in particular.
Childers noted that SUSE had already released a distribution allowing Cloud Foundry to run on top of Kubernetes, and that work was underway to allow organizations to replace the CFF’s own container orchestration engine with Kubernetes. This points toward a broader industry dynamic: Kubernetes is becoming the common substrate beneath multiple higher-level platform abstractions rather than a competing alternative to them.
For engineering teams evaluating their platform strategy, the practical implication is that a bet on Kubernetes as a foundational layer does not preclude using a PaaS abstraction on top of it — and may in fact enable one.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams
- Container adoption breadth does not equal container adoption depth. Plan your platform engineering and support capacity for the 40 percent in early stages, not just the 18 percent who have broadly deployed.
- Expect to support multiple runtime models simultaneously. Platform teams that assume a single delivery model will cause friction as serverless and PaaS usage expands alongside containers.
- DevOps practices and container adoption are correlated but not automatically linked. Organizations adopting containers without investing in corresponding cultural and process changes risk compounding operational complexity rather than reducing it.
- Kubernetes is becoming infrastructure, not a differentiator. Evaluate which higher-level abstractions your teams need on top of it, rather than treating Kubernetes itself as the end goal.
- Serverless is worth evaluating now. With 35 percent of organizations actively evaluating serverless frameworks, waiting until it is mainstream risks falling behind on tooling and operational patterns.
Survey conducted by ClearPath Strategies on behalf of the Cloud Foundry Foundation; sample size of 601 IT decision-makers. Original reporting via containerjournal.com, published 2018.