Originally published in The New Stack Update.
In less than a year, the percentage of container users running containers on Windows hosts has risen from 9 percent to 29 percent. Portworx’s 2017 survey cleverly used a few identical questions from a ClusterHQ/DevOps.com survey we wrote about in 2016. The huge rise in adoption is too big to be caused by online surveys’ self-selection problem. Instead, more people are running containers on Windows hosts because containers have become more mainstream. Of course, Linux still has a preeminent position in many cloud-native ecosystems, and Microsoft is actively supporting the use of Linux, but developers still have reasons to run Windows containers. We have not seen specific proof that Microsoft’s strong partnership with Docker has caused the rise in containers running on Windows hosts. However, Microsoft just made another container-related investment with its purchase of Kubernetes-focused Deis. There are two important caveats to analyzing the chart above: 1) at least in 2016, respondents that used Windows were still most frequently putting their containers on Linux, and 2) the survey questions address issues around the OS of a container image.
