At STH one question we constantly field is why do we focus so much on non-VMware and non-Windows architectures. In fact, we switched our hosting away from Windows Server and VMware years ago. In the lab, we certainly do have Windows Server, VMware and Citrix hosts but we also use a lot of KVM and Docker nowadays. There is a reason for this and it seems to align with industry trends. Here is a visual representation of those trends from Google’s search trends. These three charts should help inform where one can spend their learning time for new skills.
Looking at a Google Trends five-year interval, we can see that VMware was completely dominant and Github was relatively unknown and Docker was an unused search term. Docker has already passed Citrix in terms of web search interest according to Google Trends.
Zooming into a two-year view, you can see that Windows is on a similar decline as VMware while there is a clear trend towards Docker according to Google Trends.
The question many will ask is, what about AWS? We removed Github and added AWS in its place and zoomed out to a three-year view:
As you can see, VMware and Windows Server have been on a fairly steep decline while Docker and AWS are on the rise.
With all of this said, there is still a huge market for Windows and VMware skills. Those looking to where the trends are pointing, technologies like Docker and platforms like AWS are going extremely rapidly. They may be the best bet for spending a portion of your time learning new skills. As Docker is now being adopted by VMware, Microsoft and AWS, there is a common thread here. Citrix had a much more muted decline as compared to what we see with VMware and Windows server likely due to the VDI and Netscaler markets it competes heavily in.
something wrong with the google embeds. I get this error:
400. That’s an error.
The requested URL was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
The trends don’t show up and I am seeing “Error 400”
Here too.
Although the last embed now shows an image where it showed a 400 yesterday.
Changed the embeds to images since some folks were having issues with the Google embeds.