The rise of Kubernetes as the de facto container orchestration platform has been a boon to organizations looking to take advantage of a microservices-based ecosystem but has proven to be a challenge for many vendors. The extreme of that challenge played out late last week as Containership announced it will be docking its boat for good on Oct. 31.

Containership Founder and CTO Norman Joyner explained in a blog post that the company was unable to adequately monetize its operations in light of Kubernetes’ rise. This included a failed attempt to pivot its Containership Cloud operations toward a more Kubernetes-focused platform.

“Ultimately, we came up short,” Joyner wrote. “It has been nearly a year and a half since the Containership Cloud re-platform, and we have failed to monetize Containership Cloud in such a way that we could build a sustainable business.”

Containership launched in early 2015, sparked by a desire to be part of the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield event. While it did not succeed in winning that competition, the company’s founders decided to make a go of it by launching its open source container scheduler.

Joyner explained that the company was formed as a way to manage and deploy containers at scale across cloud environments. This evolved into the launch of its Containership Cloud platform that supported automatic deployments into Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Digital Ocean.

The company managed to raise $2.6 million in seed funding and set out to help manage container deployments. It positioned itself in many ways, including as an alternative to Heroku. It also added support for other cloud players like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Packet.

Unfortunately, the rise of Kubernetes and broad adoption of that container orchestration platform by the large cloud players limited the need of an outside vendor.

Containership Not the Only One

Kubernetes dominance has also impacted larger players in the space.

Mesosphere recently changed its name to D2iQ with a new focus on “day two” operations. This is around the actual support of those platforms running in a production environment.

D2iQ co-founder and CTO Tobi Knaup explained to SDxCentral that the push behind Kubernetes had a “significant” impact on its decision. “Not just the push by the ecosystem, but the pace of advancement in Kubernetes capabilities,” Knaup said.

“Kubernetes is emerging as a key deployment and operations framework for cloud-native applications to help anchor production deployments in both private and hybrid multi-cloud implementations,” explained Paul Parker-Johnson, principal analyst at ACG Research, in an email to SDxCentral tied to the D2iQ rebranding. “To frame its product and services offerings in a way that directly enables ‘day two’ operational capabilities for Kubernetes-based applications leans directly into the main line of where app developers want to go and where operations teams need to go as well.”

And that need is moving quickly. A recent survey conducted by security firm StackRox found that 86% of organizations are using Kubernetes compared with 57% just six months ago. A report from Gartner predicts that more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022 compared to less than 30% today.

Others are taking notice.

Docker Inc.’s recent 3.0 update for its flagship Enterprise platform was based heavily on deeper Kubernetes integration. It also included its own version of a hosted Kubernetes service dubbed the Docker Kubernetes Service (DKS).

VMware last month paid $2.7 billion for sister-company Pivotal Software, which itself recently launched alpha versions of two of its managed platforms and announced plans to move a third to that status later this year. The moves were part of its broader push to ease enterprise management of cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes.

And, IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat, which has a history of leaning on Kubernetes. IBM quickly migrated all of its legacy software portfolio to be available through Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused OpenShift platform.

Linux containers have been around for almost a decade, but it was only with the release of Docker four years ago that large numbers of developers began to adopt the technology. Now it seems that containers are everywhere and their popularity continues to rise.

Containers have become such an important part of the IT landscape that server virtualization giants like VMware and Microsoft have had to go out of their way to accommodate them. VMware now offers a way to deploy, run and manage containers from within its vSphere virtualization infrastructure management system, while Microsoft — which has built Hyper-V server virtualization into its Windows Server product — has partnered with Docker to create Windows Server containers, and containerization support has been added to the Windows 10 kernel.

That’s because virtual machines (VMs) used to be the go-to technology for agile organizations. Now many of these organizations are rethinking their virtualization strategies and looking to containers either in addition to, or instead of, VMs.

Developers in the driver’s seat

If there is one population of IT professionals among which containers in general, and Docker, in particular, has proved particularly popular, it is software developers. The reasons for this include Docker’s ease of installation and use, its capability to automate common tasks, its useful documentation and code snippets, and perhaps even the fact that it is open source. And it’s almost certainly true that these factors combined have helped to make Docker popular with developers.

But there’s more to it than that. Here are five reasons that developers love Docker.

1. The trend towards microservices

There is a trend today away from monolithic apps and towards a microservices architecture with applications (or services) built from multiple self-contained components. In many cases these components are perfect candidates for containerization. “Developers like containers because they make it easier for them to move to a microservices architecture — they reduce friction,” says Dave Bartoletti, an analyst at Forrester Research.

In fact, the relationship between containers and microservices architecture is complex because the two are interdependent, according to Al Gillen, a software development analyst at research firm IDC. “Containers give you the ability to ‘do’ microservices, and microservices work well with containers,” he says. Put another way, developers like containers because they are convenient for building microservices, and one reason for the popularity of the microservices architecture is that containers make them easy to implement. It’s a kind of chicken and egg situation.

2. The rise of DevOps

There’s another reason developers like the microservices architecture, Gillen says. “If you build microservices, or a compartmentalized app with small logical pieces that interact through APIs, then that is better for moving towards DevOps,” he says.

You could argue that most developers care about writing code and not about how their applications are deployed, but the reality is that the DevOps process is becoming more common, and containerization certainly makes deployment easier. That’s because containers will run in any environment — from a laptop to a data center or the cloud — and many DevOps tasks can be automated using Docker. “You can certainly do DevOps without containers, but each builds on the other,” says Bartoletti. “If you want DevOps, it is easy to do on a container infrastructure.”

3. Developer laziness

Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, famously called laziness one of the three virtues of a great programmer. (The other two, in case you were wondering, are impatience and hubris.)

Laziness in this context means using labor-saving tools and automation whenever possible, and containers make this kind of laziness very easy. “Before, developers would write their code and send it off to be tested, and it didn’t work,” says Bartoletti. “Then the developer would realize that there were changes to the Linux environment that they had made, so the test environment would have to be reconfigured. But with containerized code they can send their work to test without needing to do any modifications.”

Docker also makes it easy for developers to be lazy by offering a useful set of tools that automate many of the most boring and mundane tasks associated with the app creation and development process. One such task is setting up Docker; Docker Machine lets developers spin up Docker in the cloud with a single command.

4. The attraction of open source tools

The simple fact that Docker is open source and has a wide community of contributors as well as partners is another reason for its popularity with developers.

Open source development tools tend to be popular with developers because they are interested in development tools in general and because they are uniquely qualified to write and contribute code – or plugins to the code – to make open source development tools better.

In addition, many developers are reluctant to get “locked in” to a particular vendor’s platform, and Docker is part of an open source ecosystem that includes Docker’s Swarm orchestration system, for example, but also includes alternative orchestration systems such as Google’s Kubernetes. And because it is open source, developers are free to write their own orchestration system if they wish.

Since a container system such as Docker is a fundamental part of an organization’s IT infrastructure, the fact that it is open source is also extremely helpful when it comes to troubleshooting and optimization. Because developers aren’t working with a “black box,” when problems or unexpected behavior occurs they can look at Docker’s source code to identify problems and understand how to work around them.

5. Enhanced career prospects

One final reason why developers like using containers and Docker is that it’s (relatively) new. “Developers generally want to get their hands on the newest tools, and that’s because it is an investment in their career,” he says.

“You don’t want the lead item on your resume to be that you have 50 years of COBOL experience, but if you can say that you up to speed with agile development techniques and you are familiar with Docker then that’s going to look good.”