Content ReportContainer2022

Updated November 2022
9 INSIGHTS ON
REAL-WORLD
CONTAINER USE
Modern engineering teams continue to expand their use

of containers, and today container-based microservice
applications are pervasive. Growing container usage
is driving organizations to adopt complementary
technologies that simplify how they operate their clusters,
and this expanding container environment presents
organizations with security challenges.
For this report, we examined more than 1.5 billion containers run by tens of
thousands of Datadog customers to understand the state of the container
ecosystem. Read on for more insights and trends gathered from the latest
real-world usage data.
“This survey demonstrates that the container and Kubernetes revolution

is going from strength to strength. The results reveal how cloud native
organizations using containers and Kubernetes are not just moving
faster but gaining increased confidence—building and deploying
larger applications and workloads in more mission-critical, production
environments than ever.
Cloud native organizations are well placed for the road ahead, thanks to
the innovation driven by more than 175,000 contributors in the cloud native
ecosystem. The technology they are creating means engineering teams of
all sizes can build and run applications to meet the economic demands of
today’s apps.”
—Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director, Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Kubernetes continues to be the most
popular container management system
Kubernetes is more popular than ever. Today, nearly half of container
organizations run Kubernetes to deploy and manage containers in a growing
ecosystem. Tools like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS)
Blueprints and Amazon EKS Anywhere—as well as other managed Kubernetes
services—make it easy for teams to run Kubernetes clusters in the cloud
and on-premise.
“At AWS, we’re committed to giving our customers a streamlined Kubernetes

experience so they can easily manage and scale their clusters while
benefiting from the security and resiliency of a fully managed AWS service.
New capabilities like Amazon EKS Blueprints and Amazon EKS Anywhere
make it faster and easier for customers to configure and deploy Kubernetes
clusters across AWS and on-premises environments, so they can get the
same, consistent Amazon EKS experience wherever they need it to best
support their applications and end users.”
—Barry Cooks, Vice President, Kubernetes at Amazon Web Services

Serverless container technologies continue to grow
in popularity across all major public clouds
Usage of serverless container technologies from all major cloud providers—
including AWS App Runner, AWS Fargate, Azure Container Apps, Azure
Container Instances (ACI), and Google Cloud Run—increased from 21 percent
in 2020 to 36 percent in 2022 (YTD). This echoes increases we saw in previous
research that included a shift of Amazon ECS users toward AWS Fargate.
Customers cite reducing the need to provision and manage underlying

infrastructure as one of the main reasons for adopting serverless technologies
for containers. Those customers not using serverless technologies prefer the
control and flexibility they get from managing their own infrastructure.
Use of multiple cloud providers
increases with organization size
Our data shows that over 30 percent of container organizations using 1,000
or more hosts work in multiple clouds, and that multi-cloud usage is lowest
among organizations running the fewest hosts. Also, we see that multi-cloud
organizations have more containers on average than single-cloud organizations.
Kubernetes Ingress usage is rising
To manage requests from outside of the cluster at scale, administrators often
use Ingress to configure routes to multiple services in the cluster. Today, more
than 35 percent of organizations use Ingress, which has been generally available
since Kubernetes version 1.19 was released in August 2020.
As our customers operate more clusters and pods, they face increasing
complexity in routing and network management. Many early adopters of
Kubernetes used cloud-provided load balancers to route traffic to their services.
But Ingress is often more cost efficient, and its adoption has increased steadily
since its release.
Kubernetes Gateway API—which graduated to beta in July 2022—is the next step
in the evolution of network management for containers. Gateway API provides
advanced networking capabilities, including the use of custom resources and
role-oriented design that uses API resources to model organizational roles. We
look forward to seeing whether Gateway API displaces Ingress or whether the
two technologies are used side by side.
Service meshes are still early and
Istio dominates usage
Service meshes provide service discovery, load balancing, timeouts, and retries,
and allow administrators to manage the cluster’s security and monitor its
performance. Our previous research illustrated the early adoption of service
meshes, and the initial patterns we saw are largely unchanged. Among our
customers, we primarily see Istio and Linkerd, with Istio being more than three
times as popular as Linkerd.
“Service meshes have proven the value of delivering consistent security,

observability & control for traffic in the enterprise. Istio has clearly
established itself as the leading mesh solution and I’m proud of the work
the community has done to get to this point. The recently completed
donation of Istio to the CNCF will grow and strengthen our community to
build on this success.”
—Louis Ryan, Co-creator of Istio and Principal Engineer at Google

Most hosts use a Kubernetes release that’s
more than eighteen months old
Kubernetes releases three new versions per year to provide users with new
features, security improvements, and bug fixes. We’ve seen in previous research
that users often prefer to wait more than a year before adopting those new
versions. We’ve learned anecdotally that some customers’ reason for this delay
is to ensure the stability of their clusters and compatibility with API versions.
Today, the most popular version in use is v1.21, which was released in April 2021
and officially passed its end of life date earlier this year.
Over 30 percent of hosts running containerd
use an unsupported version
Previous research shows an increase in usage of containerd, which is one of the
CRI-compliant runtimes that organizations can adopt as Dockershim is being
deprecated. We’ve found that only about 69 percent of containerd hosts are
using version 1.5 or 1.6, which are the actively supported versions. Notably, about
31 percent of containerd hosts are using versions 1.4 or older, which have passed
their end of life dates.
Running older software versions presents issues around security and compliance
and, in the case of container runtimes, introduces the risk of vulnerabilities such
as container escapes. The fact that many hosts are using unsupported container
runtime versions highlights the challenges organizations face in running
appropriate tooling to maintain container security and compliance. Serverless
container technologies reduce the risks of outdated runtimes and the burden
of manual updates, which may be one reason we’ve seen a shift to serverless
containers across all clouds.
Access management is improving but
continues to be a challenge
Kubernetes administrators use role-based access control (RBAC) to allow
subjects (users, groups, or service accounts) to access or modify resources inthe
cluster. According to security best practices, subjects should only have necessary
permissions, and administrators must use caution when granting RBAC privileges
that are associated with escalation risks. These include permissions that enable
subjects to list all secrets or create workloads, certificates, or token requests that
could allow them to modify their own privileges.
The good news is that as organizations deploy more clusters, a decreasing

percentage of those clusters use overly permissive privileges. We suspect that
the number is coming down as organizations adopt security practices such as
permission audits, and tools such as automated RBAC scanners. However, we
found that about 40 percent of clusters still use lax privileges, which presents a
security risk.
NGINX, Redis, and Postgres are—once again—
the most popular container images
As of September 2022, the most popular off-the-shelf container images are:
1. NGINX: This is once again the most popular container image. NGINX
provides caching, load balancing, and proxying capabilities to nearly 50
percent of organizations that use containers.
2. Redis: Organizations can deploy Redis in a container to use as a key-value
data store, cache, or message broker.
3. Postgres: Usage of this relational database has grown slightly from last year.
4. Elasticsearch: This highly performant document store and search engine
continues to be one of the most popular images in use.
5. Kafka: Organizations can easily add event streaming capabilities to their
applications by deploying Kafka in a container.
6. RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ supports decoupled architecture in microservice-
based applications.
7. MongoDB: MongoDB continues to be one of the most popular NoSQL
databases in use.
8. MySQL: This open source database is lower on the list than it used to be.
But MySQL’s performance and scalability give it a continual spot in the list
of most popular container images.
9. Calico: Calico is a networking provider that lets administrators manage the
security of the network within their Kubernetes clusters.
10. GitLab: To help teams adopt and maintain DevOps practices, GitLab
provides repository management, issue tracking, and CI/CD pipelines.
11. Vault: Teams can use Vault to simplify secrets management and help
maintain secure applications.
In Kubernetes StatefulSets, we found that Redis, Postgres, Elasticsearch,

RabbitMQ, and Kafka were the most commonly deployed images.
M ETH O DO LOGY
Population
For this report, we compiled usage data from thousands of companies and
more than 1.5 billion containers, so we are confident that the trends we have
identified are robust. But while Datadog’s customers span most industries
and run the gamut from startups to Fortune 100s, they do have some things
in common. First, they tend to be serious about software infrastructure and
application performance. And they skew toward adoption of cloud platforms
and services more than the general population. All the results in this article
are biased by the fact that the data comes from our customer base, a large but
imperfect sample of the entire global market.
Counting
We excluded the Datadog Agent and Kubernetes pause containers from
this investigation.
Fact #1
In the 2020 Container Report, we found that Kubernetes was used by half of
container organizations, which we defined as organizations using the Docker,
CRI-O, or containerd container runtimes. In 2022, we expanded our definition of
a container organization to get a more comprehensive picture of who is running
containers. By this expanded definition, container organizations include those
using new container technologies, including serverless containers. As a result,
this year’s research found a greater number of container organizations. But
even in this larger ecosystem, the percentage of container organizations using
Kubernetes is growing.
Fact #3
To estimate the relative scale of a company’s infrastructure environment, we
examined the number of cloud instances used by the company during each
month from January 2020 to September 2022.
datadog.com

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Updated November 2022

Modern engineering teams continue to expand their use

“This survey demonstrates that the container and Kubernetes revolution

—Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director, Cloud Native Computing Foundation

“At AWS, we’re committed to giving our customers a streamlined Kubernetes

—Barry Cooks, Vice President, Kubernetes at Amazon Web Services

Customers cite reducing the need to provision and manage underlying

“Service meshes have proven the value of delivering consistent security,

—Louis Ryan, Co-creator of Istio and Principal Engineer at Google

The good news is that as organizations deploy more clusters, a decreasing

In Kubernetes StatefulSets, we found that Redis, Postgres, Elasticsearch,

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