Two thirds in production – not bad for a six-year old initiative. In its recently released ‘state of the community,’ the global OpenStack User Survey of just over 1,600 members and 405 deployments indicates that 65% of deployments are now in production. This figure represents a growth of 33% over the past year.
Why are organizations choosing OpenStack?
Saving on financial outlays was the primary reason to choose OpenStack over infrastructure alternatives for almost two thirds of respondents. Avoiding vendor lock-in has become increasingly important to 92% of respondents, which is a higher percentage than the 76% who noted this issue in the previous survey.
Another of the top five reasons selected by almost all users was to obtain the benefits of standardized APIs, which provide the ability to connect with a variety of public and private cloud solutions. “API-driven access to all components” was noted as a major benefit of OpenStack. With the broad pool of contributors, many talents are able to add to the inherent innovation that is present in the OpenStack community. Almost 80% of respondents perceive a business advantage with the ability to deploy applications faster, which can also improve the organization’s ability to innovate.
Organizations of all sizes from startups through enterprises are using OpenStack. While almost 60% work in organizations with more than one thousand employees, a growing number of smaller companies are now on board.
Which release?
The uptake on the latest two releases, Kilo and Liberty, is a nice vote of confidence by the community in the stability and maturity of OpenStack. Now, 94% of deployments are using the two most recent releases of OpenStack. Since Mitaka was only released two months after the bi-annual survey, upgrades to this release will only be noted next autumn. The following chart shows how Juno and Kilo have been widely adopted and also notes the trend to deploy or upgrade to the more recent OpenStack versions. However, a number of respondents noted that there is still room for improvement both with the consistency and to reduce the complexity; to ease deployment and improve stability
Source: http://www.openstack.org/assets/survey/April-2016-User-Survey-Report.pdf
Many of these findings are confirmed by a recent independent study by Talligent of almost 650 professionals. However, in their survey only 30% were using OpenStack in production.
Many of these findings are confirmed by a recent independent study by Talligent of almost 650 professionals. However, in their survey only 30% were using OpenStack in production. In this Talligent study, over half of respondents predict that their cloud will remain a private cloud, or will be primarily private cloud in a hybrid configuration for the next five years.
Both surveys were in agreement that top reason to choose OpenStack was to lower the cost of infrastructure, often in comparison the equivalent cost in the public cloud. As for challenges, the Talligent study noted the security model (26%) and the lack of operational tools (23%). The need for stronger deployment, debugging and troubleshooting tools was also noted in the OpenStack User Survey. Still almost half of the respondents see themselves as promoters of OpenStack, while only 18% consider themselves detractors.
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