If it’s lack of options for persistence that’s keeping you from using containers, maybe it’s time you reconsider.

You’re not the only one concerned about container persistence: 82 percent of respondents in a recent survey said they’d deploy containers within two years if storage challenges could be resolved. That is a legitimate concern, as containers can offer great versatility and efficiency compared to virtualization, but being forced to work with stateless apps or to implement hacks to work with state management in containers poses severe limitations.

It also poses great opportunities for solutions that can offer a way forward to app developers, which is why MapR announced its PACC initiative to address this gap. As Andrew Brust wrote last week, “the new MapR Persistent Application Client Container (PACC) allow converged apps in Docker containers to see running MapR clusters, just as if the apps were deployed directly to a virtual machine or physical server.”

This means PACC apps will be able to persist their state on MapR-FS, MapR-DB, or MapR-Stream. Somewhat puzzlingly, features praise from Mesosphere’s VP of product marketing Edward Hsu: “MapR’s recent innovation to make its platform available in a containerised setup expands the already broad set of backing data services that work on DC/OS. We’re excited to see MapR embracing containers and together explore the opportunities that this move opens up.”

Puzzlingly, because this seems to clash with Mesosphere’s own Container 2.0 stack, marketed as Container + State and implemented as an alliance with Confluent, DataStax, and Lightbend. The former two are MapR’s competitors in streaming and storage respectively.

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