OpenStack User Survey Reveals Growing Number of Deployments, Greater Scale and Global Diversity

The latest User Survey catalogued 44 percent more deployments than one year ago; 74 percent of those deployments located outside of the US

AUSTIN, Texas // April 20, 2017 — Capturing 44 percent more deployments and gaining input from 22 percent more organizations than one year ago, the OpenStack Foundation User Survey, published today, reveals growing adoption, increased scale and a more diverse user base, driven by the desire to accelerate innovation and avoid vendor lock-in.

OpenStack’s ninth User Survey demonstrates the open infrastructure platform used for private clouds, public clouds and telecom networks has broad appeal for organizations of all sizes around the world. Thirty-two percent of users have 10,000 employees or more, while 25 percent of organizations have fewer than 100 employees. Sixty-one percent of these users and 74 percent of deployments are physically located outside of the United States.

The growing adoption of OpenStack also applies to the amount of an organization’s overall infrastructure running on OpenStack. The typical (median) OpenStack user runs 61 percent to 80 percent of their infrastructure on OpenStack; among larger clouds of 1,000 cores or more, the median user runs 81 to 100 percent of their overall infrastructure on OpenStack.

Key findings among OpenStack deployments:

• The typical size of an OpenStack cloud size increased; 37 percent of clouds have 1,000 or more cores, compared to 29 percent last year, and 3 percent of clouds have more than 100,000 cores. The number of users using Nova cells also increased 218 percent.
• Swift object provisioning also saw greater scale. Sixteen percent of deployments provisioned more than 1 petabyte of object storage, compared to 4 percent last year, and 33 percent reported storing 100,000 or more objects, versus 13 percent last year.
• The business drivers for OpenStack adoption continue to highlight its competitive advantages, including accelerating the organization’s ability to innovate and avoiding vendor-lock in. Users say these business drivers are even more important than saving money and increasing operational efficiency, which ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in past surveys.
• Containers remain the top emerging technology of interest to users. Sixty-five percent of those running OpenStack services inside containers use Docker runtime, while 47 percent of those using containers to orchestrate apps on OpenStack use Kubernetes.
• The share of OpenStack deployments in production remains stable, with two-thirds of clouds in production. The large proportion of clouds in production demonstrates the maturity of OpenStack, while the substantial influx of clouds in proof-of-concept and test stages predicts healthy growth for the future.
• This growth in new deployments was demonstrated by the average age of a deployment—just 1.68 years. Fifty-six percent of deployments surveyed were launched in 2016 or 2017.
• The typical deployment runs nine projects, with 16 percent running 12 or more projects. All of OpenStack’s core services are in use by 89–98 percent of clouds, a significant increase over last year for every core project in production. Heat, Telemetry, Swift, Rally, Kolla and Barbican also showing significant increases in adoption.
• Among the projects of greatest interest to users, and likely to see strong future adoption, Designate, Magnum, Trove, and Manila top the list, with Kolla and Barbican interest also up significantly.

***The full User Survey report is available here.***

About the User Survey
Conducted semiannually since April 2013 by the User Committee, Foundation staff and an independent data scientist, the User Survey is intended to poll a slice of the OpenStack user base to better understand attitudes, organizational profiles, use cases and technology choices. More than 1,300 users, spanning 476 cities and 78 countries, took part in the ninth semiannual survey. Data is shared with technical leadership and the community to help make design decisions and plan the future roadmap.

Online Analysis Dashboard Available
The OpenStack Foundation introduced a survey dashboard, now in beta, with six global filter categories enabling anyone to perform their own analysis. This dashboard—accessible at http://www.openstack.org/analytics—presents 2017 results in comparison to 2016 results.

Learn More about the User Survey at OpenStack Summit Boston
Findings from the User Survey will be discussed during a session at the OpenStack Summit Boston, May 8-11. Thousands of attendees from 50+ countries are expected to attend the Summit to discuss how OpenStack is helping companies increase agility and save money as software becomes more strategic to their business. The schedule for the Boston Summit is available online. (Media and analyst passes are available. Contact [email protected])

About OpenStack®
OpenStack is the standard for private clouds and is also available as a service via dozens of public cloud providers around the world. At its core, OpenStack is an open source integration engine that provides APIs to orchestrate bare metal, virtual machine and container resources on a single network. The same OpenStack code powers a global network of public and private clouds, backed by the largest ecosystem of technology providers, to enable cost savings, control and portability.
OpenStack is a global community of more than 70,000 individuals across 180 countries supported by the OpenStack Foundation, which facilitates the development of many innovative projects in the open infrastructure space. The community delivers two software releases each year, which are Apache 2 licensed and productized by a large ecosystem of technology vendors in our Marketplace. For more information and to join the community, visit www.OpenStack.org.

###

Media Contacts:

Robert Cathey
Cathey Communications for the OpenStack Foundation
m 865-386-6118
e [email protected]

Lauren Sell
Vice President of Marketing, OpenStack Foundation
e [email protected]

http://www.openstack.org