Note: This may not generalize to your use case. We mainly serve big data customers including banks, telco, and have also seen other environments similar to the "air gapped environments" listed below.
That being said:
Would just like to add some coloring to this.
>> However, not every customer that wants on-premise is a government agency with air gapped servers.
This is the bulk of our customer base and also a very large portion of the market still. I deliver software via dvd (flash drives nor wifi not allowed)
A few notes from these kinds of customers:
They won't let you just install anything.
Docker is great but doesn't have a lot of enterprise adoption (despite the self perpetuating hype cycle) outside the companies that already have mature software engineering teams as a core competency.
They are often running centos 6.5 or less yet.
A lot of these environments still require deb/rpm based installation.
Admins at companies that run on prem installations tend to be very reserved about their tech stack. Docker looks like the wild west to folks like that.
Our core demographic:
We do a lot of hadoop related work. We have a dockerized version of[1] that we deploy for customers.
We have also been forced to go the more traditional ssh based yum/deb route. We have automation for both.
They are right that many "on prem" accounts are now "someone else's AWS account".
We also have to run stuff on windows server as well. Docker won't fly in that kind of environment either. Microsoft still has large market share in enterprise yet and will for a long time.
K8s and co is great where I can use it, but it shouldn't be assumed that it will work everywhere let alone in most places in the wild yet. Hopefully that changes in the coming years.
Again: This is one anecdote. There are different slices of the market.
A lot of these environments still require deb/rpm based installation.
Still? I didn't know the "dev" in devops had eaten "ops" and standard practice is to start shitting files wildly all over a server. Just because it's in a container/vm doesn't make that any less gross of a practice.
A package(s) that behaves well within the rest of the distribution, and lets sysadmins use their favorite configuration management to setup /etc/foo/bar is exactly the level of control I want as a customer, and would want to afford admins if I was a vendor.
Giving customers the option of a prepackaged virtualization/container solution is fine and all, but I'd take a wizard-installer-for-linux over a VM image any day. I deal with installers already, and while less than ideal they're easy enough to have wrestle the output into a .deb and throw on our internal repo. Then I can apt install it wherever I want.
Some are on Oracle Linux, which on a few occasions does not have compatibility with how RHEL nor CentOS work despite the similarities and pitches. Patching OEL is more awkward in my experience mostly because of Oracle rather than for any technical reason.
We also have to run stuff on windows server as well. Docker won't fly in that kind of environment either. Microsoft still has large market share in enterprise yet and will for a long time.
Containers are built into Windows Server 2016, and they're powered by Docker. (or Hyper-V for full-VM containers).
No one is going to bet on containers in windows in production for at least a year or 2. And the ones that do will likely be "early adopters" even after a few years. Look no further than the companies trying to fork docker due to lack of stability:
http://thenewstack.io/docker-fork-talk-split-now-table/
Windows 2016 just became GA so it will still take some time for bugs to be smothered out. It addition to this running docker containers inside a windows 2016 VM does not help as you are still end up running static VMs.
Unless cloud providers offering ability to run Windows containers directly on the cloud platform, there are no efficiency gains.
That being said: Would just like to add some coloring to this.
>> However, not every customer that wants on-premise is a government agency with air gapped servers.
This is the bulk of our customer base and also a very large portion of the market still. I deliver software via dvd (flash drives nor wifi not allowed)
A few notes from these kinds of customers: They won't let you just install anything.
Docker is great but doesn't have a lot of enterprise adoption (despite the self perpetuating hype cycle) outside the companies that already have mature software engineering teams as a core competency.
They are often running centos 6.5 or less yet.
A lot of these environments still require deb/rpm based installation.
Admins at companies that run on prem installations tend to be very reserved about their tech stack. Docker looks like the wild west to folks like that.
Our core demographic: We do a lot of hadoop related work. We have a dockerized version of[1] that we deploy for customers.
We have also been forced to go the more traditional ssh based yum/deb route. We have automation for both.
They are right that many "on prem" accounts are now "someone else's AWS account".
We also have to run stuff on windows server as well. Docker won't fly in that kind of environment either. Microsoft still has large market share in enterprise yet and will for a long time.
K8s and co is great where I can use it, but it shouldn't be assumed that it will work everywhere let alone in most places in the wild yet. Hopefully that changes in the coming years.
Again: This is one anecdote. There are different slices of the market.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2016/10/03/skyminds...