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

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.***