The OpenStack Foundation announced that its user survey for 2016 showed that it achieved 44% more deployments and gained input from 22% more organisations than a year ago, while also revealing increased scale of deployments and a more diverse user base as users seek to avoid vendor lock-in.
OpenStack notes that the ninth user survey indicates that the open infrastructure platform for private and public clouds and telecom networks has growing appeal for organisations of all sizes. Specifically, the survey shows that 32% of users have 10,000 employees or more and 25% of organisations have fewer than 100 employees, with around 61% of users and 74% of deployments physically located outside of the U.S.
In addition, OpenStack notes that the typical (median) OpenStack user is running 61% to 80% of infrastructure on OpenStack, while for larger clouds with 1,000 cores or more, the median user is running 81% to 100% of the overall infrastructure on OpenStack.
Further key findings revealed by the OpenStack user survey include:
1. The typical size of an OpenStack cloud increased, with 37% of clouds having 1,000 or more cores, compared to 29% in 2015, and 3% of clouds with more than 100,000 cores; the number of users operating Nova cells increased by 218%.
2. Swift object provisioning also showed increased scale, with 16% of deployments provisioning more than 1 petabyte of object storage (4% last year), while 33% reported storing 100,000 or more objects (13% last year).
3. The business drivers for OpenStack adoption highlight its competitive advantages, including accelerated innovation and avoiding vendor-lock in; respondents stated that these factors are more important than reducing costs and increasing operational efficiency, which ranked No. 1 and 2 in past surveys.
4. Containers remain the leading technology of interest to users, with 65% of those running OpenStack services inside containers using Docker runtime, while 47% of those using containers to orchestrate apps on OpenStack employing Kubernetes.
5. The proportion of OpenStack deployments in production remains stable, with around two-thirds of clouds in production, while number of clouds in proof-of-concept and test stages indicating healthy growth for the future.
6. A typical deployment runs nine projects, with 16% running 12 or more projects; all of OpenStack's core services are in use by 89–98% of clouds, significantly higher than last year for core projects in production.
