Container (Docker)

The shipping container of the digital age — standardising how software moves from development to production and saving enterprises billions in the process. Over 90% of the Fortune 500 now use container technology in production, and the global container market surpassed $10 billion in 2026, growing at 25% CAGR. Organisations adopting containers report 40–60% improvements in infrastructure utilisation, 50% faster deployment times, and significant reductions in environment-related bugs. Just as Malcolm McLean's standardised shipping container revolutionised global trade in the 1950s by making cargo transport interchangeable across ships, trains, and lorries, Docker containers have revolutionised software delivery by making applications portable across any computing environment.

What It Is A container is a lightweight, self-contained package that includes everything an application needs to run: the code, the runtime environment, the system libraries, and the configuration settings. Unlike a virtual machine, which includes an entire operating system and can consume gigabytes of resources, a container shares the host machine's operating system kernel, making it extraordinarily efficient — typically only megabytes in size and starting in milliseconds rather than minutes. The analogy that resonates most with business leaders is the international shipping container. Before standardisation, cargo was loaded and unloaded piece by piece — a labour-intensive, error-prone process. Standardised containers meant that any container could travel on any ship, train, or lorry, regardless of what was inside. Software containers work the same way: a developer packages an application once, and it runs identically on a laptop, a test server, or a production cloud environment. No more "it works on my machine" problems. Docker, founded in 2013, created the standard that the industry rallied around. While container technology existed in various forms in Linux for decades, Docker made it accessible, portable, and developer-friendly. Today, Docker images — the templates from which containers are created — are the universal currency of cloud-native software delivery.

Why It Matters for Business Containers deliver value across three critical business dimensions: speed, efficiency, and resilience. Speed because containers can be started and stopped in seconds, enabling rapid scaling and deployment. Efficiency because containers use far fewer resources than virtual machines — organisations typically consolidate 5–10 virtual machines worth of workloads onto a single containerised host, reducing infrastructure costs by 30–50%. Resilience because containers are isolated from one another, meaning a failure in one container does not cascade to others. Spotify reported saving $10 million annually after migrating to containers, by improving server utilisation from 20% to over 60%. The music streaming service runs over 2,000 containerised services and deploys hundreds of times per day. Similarly, Adidas reduced infrastructure costs by 40% and deployment time from 4–6 weeks to 15 minutes after containerising its e-commerce platform. Containers also enable hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. Because a container is portable, organisations can run workloads on-premises, in AWS, in Azure, or in Google Cloud without modification. This portability provides negotiating leverage with cloud providers and reduces lock-in risk — a strategic advantage that resonates with CFOs and CIOs alike.

Enterprise Use Cases Goldman Sachs containerised over 90% of its trading applications, reducing infrastructure provisioning time from weeks to minutes. During periods of market volatility, the bank can now spin up additional trading system capacity in seconds rather than waiting days for new virtual machines. This agility has directly improved the firm's ability to capture fleeting trading opportunities and manage risk in real time. Marks & Spencer migrated its entire e-commerce platform to a containerised architecture running on Kubernetes, reducing page load times by 30% and improving site reliability during peak shopping events like Black Friday. The retailer reported that its engineering teams now deploy code 10 times more frequently than before the migration, enabling faster response to customer behaviour and market trends. DBS Bank, named the "World's Best Digital Bank" by Euromoney, built its entire digital banking platform on a containerised, microservices architecture. The approach has enabled DBS to launch new financial products in days rather than months, contributing to a 22% increase in digital customer acquisition and a 20% reduction in IT operating costs over three years.

Vendor Landscape Docker Inc. remains the primary tool for building and packaging containers, with Docker Desktop used by over 25 million developers worldwide as of 2026. Docker Hub, the largest container image registry, hosts over 16 million repositories. For running containers at scale in production, Kubernetes — originally developed at Google and now the industry standard — orchestrates containers across clusters of machines. All three major cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes services: Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE, with pricing typically based on the control plane ($0.10–$0.73 per hour) plus underlying compute resources. Red Hat OpenShift provides an enterprise Kubernetes platform with built-in CI/CD, security scanning, and developer tools, with pricing starting at approximately $3,000 per node pair annually. VMware Tanzu serves enterprises standardised on VMware infrastructure.

Strategic Considerations Adopt containers when your organisation develops or operates custom software, when you need to accelerate deployment velocity, or when you are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. Avoid containerisation for monolithic applications that are stable and rarely updated — the migration effort will not justify the returns. Start with new applications and a ...