Surveys conducted by five organizations, including the OpenStack Foundation User Survey, document acceleration of OpenStack adoption across industries and regions, and attest to the open source software’s "essential" role in multi-cloud environments, NFV and IoT/edge computing.

Key Findings:

• In the OpenStack User Survey, respondents indicated that users from 48 percent of deployments are also interacting with another cloud. Additionally, the diversity of users was demonstrated in year-over-year analysis showing growth among non-IT, mainstream industries, including significant growth among the financial and government industries, as well as growth in research, retail and telecom.
• A Cloudify-sponsored survey of nearly 700 enterprise cloud professionals found that OpenStack was the most widely deployed cloud infrastructure. Results also upheld the multi-cloud trend demonstrated in the User Survey, reporting that 51 percent of organizations are deploying more than one cloud and the second most popular two-cloud combination is AWS and OpenStack.
• In a recent SDxCentral report, 87 percent of respondents said that OpenStack would be used to manage edge infrastructure.
• A Heavy Reading survey focused on telecom operators found that 96 percent of those who already deploying an NFV strategy find OpenStack essential or important.
• A SUSE-sponsored survey of more than 1,400 senior IT professionals found that OpenStack is in production in 23 percent of organizations (up from 15 percent in 2015). A total of 82 percent are using or plan to use OpenStack in the future.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open-source solutions, today announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12, the latest version of Red Hat’s massively scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Based on the OpenStack "Pike" release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 introduces containerized services, improving flexibility while decreasing complexity for faster application development. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 delivers many new enhancements, including upgraded DCI (distributed continuous integration) and improved security to help maintain data compliance and manage risk.

Hundreds of customers rely on Red Hat OpenStack Platform to power their hybrid and private clouds for a variety of mission-critical deployments, including BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; Massachusetts Open Cloud; Turkcell; IAG;Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Produban; UKCloud; and Verizon. And, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is backed by a robust ecosystem of partners, including Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace, and NetApp for enterprise businesses, as well as Ericsson, Nokia, NEC, Huawei, Cisco and others from the telecommunications industry.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is designed for private or public cloud infrastructure, built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is a tested, certified, and fully-supported version of OpenStack that provides the agility to scale and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability, performance, or IT security requirements. Red Hat OpenStack Platform also includes Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat’s multi-cloud management platform, to provide operational visibility and policy-based management across the Red Hat OpenStack Platform infrastructure and workloads. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 maintains tight integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage, a highly-scalable block, object, and file storage solution, designed for scale-out clouds.

Cumulus Networks, the leading provider bringing web-scale networking to enterprise cloud, today at OpenStack Summit Sydney, announced the availability of Cumulus in the Cloud for OpenStack environments.

As the standard for both service providers and enterprises looking to build a cloud environment, over ⅓ of Cumulus Networks’ customer base is already leveraging OpenStack. OpenStack offers a rich variety of components that can be combined to build a cost-efficient, tailored private or public cloud solution, while increasing operational efficiency. Now with Cumulus in the Cloud for OpenStack, a virtual test environment that provides a low-effort way to learn Cumulus Networks’ technologies, operators have access to all the steps needed to develop fully functioning OpenStack environments.

Organizations of all sizes are increasingly dependent upon their applications and are evaluating ways to optimize application performance. Pre-production however, evaluating new IT infrastructure and developing a Proof of Concept (PoC) can be time consuming and expensive, especially for companies bound to restrictive systems from legacy vendors.

Future Hosting, a global managed server hosting provider, has warned server hosting clients not to upload private SSH keys to production servers. The warning was prompted by a rapid increase in the number of malicious scans that attempt to discover accidentally uploaded SSH keys (as reported by WordFence on October 18, 2017).

If SSH private keys fall into the hands of malicious third parties, they can be used to compromise servers and the data stored on them. Private keys can be accidentally uploaded to the publicly accessible directories of web servers, and it is trivially easy for a malicious third-party to scan for private keys in those directories.

Future Hosting advises server hosting clients to use passphrases with their SSH key pairs. Using passphrases may be inconvenient, but a key pair with a passphrase is useless to an attacker even if the private key is made public.

VMware today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire VeloCloud Networks, Inc., provider of industry-leading cloud-delivered software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology for enterprises and service providers. Once the acquisition closes, VeloCloud will enable VMware to build on the success of its industry-leading network virtualization platform -VMware NSX-and expand its networking portfolio to address end-to-end automation, application continuity, branch transformation and security from data center to cloud to edge. This acquisition will also further enable VMware to lead the industry transition to a software-defined future, and help customers bring their businesses into the digital era with networking that is ubiquitous, open, programmable and secure by default.

The transaction is expected to close in VMware’s fiscal Q4 2018. There is no change to VMware’s previously provided fiscal 2018 guidance due to this transaction.

According to Gartner, "While WAN architectures and technologies tend to evolve at a very slow pace — perhaps a new generation every 10 to 15 years — the disruptions caused by the transformation to digital business models are driving adoption of SD-WAN at a pace that is unheard of in wide-area networking" VeloCloud cloud-delivered SD-WAN technology is deployed globally at-scale by more than 1,000 customers, both directly by enterprises and by Telcos and managed services providers serving enterprise customers. Service provider customers include AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Macquarie Telecom, MetTel, Mitel, Sprint, TelePacific, Telstra, Vonage and Windstream. Enterprise customers include Bay Club, Brooks Brothers, Devcon, NCR, Redmond, Saber Healthcare Group, and Triton Management Services."

YugaByte, a cloud-native database for mission-critical applications, launched today from stealth with $8 million in Series A funding led by Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed Venture Partners and other prominent angels including Jeff Rothschild, former VP of Infrastructure at Facebook. Bipul Sinha, CEO of Rubrik, is a strategic advisor to the company.

"The knowledge and experience of YugaByte’s leadership team is just one of the many reasons we chose to invest," said Ravi Mhatre, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners. "Companies today are looking for ways to drive innovation and growth, and YugaByte, with this new cloud-native database for mission-critical data, does just that. We are excited to be on this journey with the team.”