More than 50 percent of companies will use container technology by 2020, up from less than 20 percent in 2017, according to Gartner.
Software containers allow DevOps teams and service providers to rapidly roll out applications in a consistent way -- essentially packing up code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings for deployment across enterprise servers or multiple clouds.
The challenge? Companies and service providers need to monitor and manage all those containers. Eager to address that need, New Relic recently acquired CoScale, a Belgian company with container and microservices monitoring expertise, with a special focus on Kubernetes. Key CoScale team members are relocating to New Relic's European Development Center in Barcelona, Spain.
New Relic already offers a range of mobile, web, cloud infrastructure and application performance monitoring (APM) capabilities. The company can also monitor such platforms as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and RedHat Openshift. Armed with CoScale, New Relic will expand those Kubernetes workload monitoring capabilities.
MSPs, SMBs and Software Containers
Generally speaking, the container adoption wave mostly involves enterprise customers, software companies and developers. The container trend isn't as prevalent in small businesses, typically because SMBs rely on commercial SaaS applications rather than building and deploying applications on their own.
Still, MSPs should closely monitor the container trend -- especially since some small businesses and startups see homegrown software as a competitive differentiator.
