A Look At Startup Opportunities In The Container Era

The DockerCon user conference recently concluded in San Francisco, and the evidence of the container movement gaining momentum was clear — 2,000+ attendees, 70 sponsors and more than 40 exhibitors.

Add to this the approximately $500 million of VC investment in container-related companies to date; the lists of hot startups that are beginning to appear; the anointing of new paradigms by respected investors; and the user surveys with record-breaking buying-intention scores and there is no doubt that the container wave has propelled the DevOps engineer as a new power buyer in the enterprise.

I expect that the impact of containers will be similar to that of virtualization’s impact on the data center.

The key difference between virtualization and containers is well described by Mitchell Hashimoto, DevOps guru and founder of the data center automation and management company HashiCorp: “Whereas virtualization is like the sci-fi concept of terraforming a planet, embracing containers is more akin to building many isolated biodomes on a single planet.”

Here are some of the opportunities in the container ecosystem:Virtualization created one platform company in VMware, and it looks like Docker’s visionary approach has been rewarded with a first-mover advantage. However, just as how a host of other independent players who provided adjacent services were created in the virtualization era, I see greenfield potential for entrepreneurs founding container-related companies today.

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