Containers have become a central pillar of modern IT strategy, according to a recently released survey by Rancher Labs. The survey of 1,106 tech users at large and small enterprises highlights the fact that 85% of respondents are running containers in production.

The survey results also underlines the rapid adoption of containers and Kubernetes. Kubernetes has emerged as the standard for container management with 90% of respondents using it for orchestration. Additionally, architects, developers, and DevOps are the primary drivers of adoption (69%) followed by IT Operations (30%).

It’s evident from the survey results that multiple cluster environments are becoming the norm with 91% of respondents running multiple clusters, and 45% planning multiple clusters within six months.

The most common use cases for containers today are designing microservices (71%), building customer facing applications (70%), and modernizing legacy applications (53%) Hybrid cloud deployments are prevalent with 71% of respondents running on-premises workloads while 67% are running cloud-based applications.

Moreover, Edge is emerging as an important use-case with 15% of respondents deploying containers for edge workloads.