Containers and the Chasm: A Look at Container Adoption
Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption lifecycle is gospel for tech marketers. The model describes the path of diffusion for discontinuous innovations and explains how ecosystems emerge and coalesce around IT winners.
Moore and his work have been top of mind the last couple years now as we’ve observed the rise of and hype around Linux containers.
Containers are the next evolutionary leap forward from hypervisor-based hardware virtualization, offering a way to package an application with a complete filesystem that holds everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools and libraries. Containers are smaller, faster, more portable and more developer-friendly than their virtual machine predecessors. In that, containerization represents a paradigm shift in how systems and applications are built, deployed and managed.
In the tech sector, paradigm shift is a euphemism for opportunity, and, appropriately, we’ve seen a flood of companies come to market with their flavors of tools and platforms to ultimately enable organizations to run container-based, cloud-native applications.
The rapid onset of this innovation cycle has been exacerbated by a trend toward faster release times. VMware got buyers comfortable with a new vSphere release every year. Then the OpenStack Foundation promised releases every six months. With Docker, CoreOS and others we’re seeing releases every three months, if not faster, as each vies to become the standards bearer (if only judged by press mentions or Github stars).
Consequently, lost in this shuffle have been customers who are struggling to keep up.
To assess the state of container adoption, it’s helpful to evoke Moore’s model. Let’s take a look through that lens:
Innovators are “willing to take risks, have the highest social status, have financial liquidity, are social and have closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators. Their risk tolerance allows them to adopt technologies that may ultimately fail. Financial resources help absorb these failures.” These are the Googles and Twitters of the world who have been running containers as part of distributed systems architectures years before Docker was open sourced. These companies battle test approaches and provide blue prints for the broader market but operate at a scope and scale that is many years ahead of it.
Early adopters are “individuals with the highest degree of opinion leadership among the adopter categories. Early adopters have a higher social status, financial liquidity, advanced education and are more socially forward than late adopters.” These ‘gear-heads,’ are the developers and infrastructure engineers who have been test-driving container technology because it’s the cool, new thing. These devs are evangelists and core open source contributors and are responsible for driving standards, best practices and use cases. Early adopters are gatekeepers for new technologies in organizations and drive bottoms-up adoption.
However, bottoms-up adoption will only take a new innovation so far, which brings us to Moore’s famous chasm. The chasm is a gap that exists between the first two adoption cohorts and the early majority, where buyers are described as “pragmatists in pain,” and adoption decisions are driven by business need.
The chasm is precisely where we stand today: developer interest continues to surge as standards and best practices are beginning to emerge, but the industry is still waiting on the applications and business cases which are requisite to drive more mainstream adoption.
Given that we’re at this critical inflection point, we urge companies competing in this market to take the pragmatic, customer-centric view. Ultimately, this all relates to a potential brewing problem in the formation of any new ecosystem or value chain: when the rate of innovation outpaces the rate of customer adoption companies fail.
