Almost two thirds (65%) of OpenStack users have now deployed the open source cloud computing system in production environments, a third more than a year ago.
OpenStack is a technology integration engine that supports the different ecosystem of cloud computing innovation. About 600 firms and 38,000 individuals worldwide support the project.
According to the OpenStack Foundation survey of over 1,600 users, 97% of community members said that "standardizing on the same open platform and APIs that power a global network of public and private clouds" was one of their top five considerations in choosing OpenStack.
The survey also found that organisations of all sizes use OpenStack, with 43% of respondents working in organisations of fewer than 1,000 people. Among the 405 deployments recorded, 59% of deployments were in the IT sector, 14% in academic/research, and 10% in telecommunications.
Containers technology was also found to be a continued interest for the OpenStack community, earning the most interest among emerging technologies, with 70% of respondents reporting interest in containers as a part of their OpenStack projects.
The survey said even though there were few shakeups in deployment decisions, the use of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and container orchestration tools saw significant changes among the leading technology choices, with Kubernetes leading.
According to the survey, nearly two-thirds of deployments are on-premise private clouds, a 3-point increase over last year, and more than half of these are in production.
The number of public clouds reported declined to 16% from 19% of total deployments, even though virtually all of these are in full production.
Some of the reasons to recommend OpenStack were good community support, avoiding vendor lock in, speed and agility. Fragmented governance, difficulty in deployment and project complexity were cited as some of the drawbacks.
An unnamed user from a global financial institution said: "Being a flexible framework to build on is the most important aspect of the OpenStack platform.
"Also, being able to support both traditional and cloud-native workloads is very important because large enterprises don’t have the luxury of dropping their legacy applications and forklifting them into the microservices-type designs from day one."
Google has recently revealed plans for creating hybrid clouds based on OpenStack.
The company has developed, in collaboration with Red Hat and Biarca, an OpenStack Cinder backup drive for Google Cloud Storage, available in the latest OpenStack release – Mitaka.
