According to Sysdig 2019 Container Usage Report, 50% of containers live less than five minutes—a dramatic change from last year when only 20% of containers lived less than five minutes.

The report said that many containers need to only live long enough to execute a function and then terminate when complete. The broader adoption of batch data processing with Kubernetes Jobs and serverless frameworks on Kubernetes have contributed to the growth of short-lived containers, it added.

The ephemeral nature of containers is one of the unique advantages of the technology, yet at the same time can be a challenge in managing issues around security, health, and performance. This goes on to highlight the fact that enterprises require not only real-time threat prevention but also detailed auditing and forensics tools.

For the third year in a row, the Sysdig report finds that container usage has grown in scale and complexity, and doubled in density. Talking about the report, Suresh Vasudevan, Sysdig Chief Executive Officer said that the company aims “to educate enterprises on existing challenges and how to run cloud-native environments in production, which should include a secure DevOps approach.”

Based on an analysis of 2 million containers using the Sysdig monitoring platform, the report also finds that 40% of Sysdig customers’ images are from public sources. Over the past year, the median number of containers per host doubled to 30, indicating a growth in the number of applications being transitioned to cloud-native infrastructure and an increase in compute “horsepower,” which has enabled more containers to run on each node. Year-over-year, Prometheus metric use grew 130% across Sysdig customers, increasing to 46%.