OpenStack User Survey shows wider adoption, larger clouds

In the largest survey of OpenStack deployments ever, the OpenStack User Survey revealed widespread adoption, maturity and growth, with increased user interest in innovation and agility.

OpenStack’s ninth User Survey reports the technology choices, use cases and business drivers for more than 1,300 users, comparing these most recent answers to our April 2016 report. This survey also includes nearly 600 deployments and input from 22 percent more organizations than one year ago, which had been our largest survey to date.

This survey’s findings focus primarily on year-over-year comparisons and also answer some new questions about cloud age, percentage of an organization’s overall cloud infrastructure running on OpenStack, container use and management.

The median OpenStack user runs 60 to 80 percent of their total cloud infrastructure on OpenStack.

Results show users’ attitudes, technology choices and uses of OpenStack software. All OpenStack Foundation members, more than 70,000 people across 160 countries, were invited to fill out the survey. Responses span 476 cities and 78 countries, with 61 percent of these users and 74 percent of deployments physically located outside of the United States.

Key findings:

More clouds: OpenStack’s growth is demonstrated by rapid development of new clouds, with 44 percent more deployments reported on this survey. The average age of a deployment is less than 1.7 years.
Larger clouds: 38 percent of clouds have 1,000 or more cores, up from 29 percent last year, and 17 percent of clouds are running more than 1 petabyte of object storage, up from 4 percent one year ago.
Diverse users: Users of every organizational size and industry find value in OpenStack, 32 percent have 10,000 employees or more, while 25 percent have fewer than 100 employees, and users hail from 78 countries.

Mature technology: OpenStack’s maturity is demonstrated by two-thirds of deployments in production and 90 percent or greater adoption of key infrastructure services (Nova, Neutron, Keystone, Cinder and Glance).
Deep adoption: The median user runs 61–80 percent of their overall cloud infrastructure on OpenStack, while the typical large user (deployment with 1,000+ cores) reports running 81–100 percent of their infrastructure on OpenStack.

Containers remain the top emerging technology of interest to users. Among those currently deploying container orchestration or platform services on OpenStack, 47 percent are using Kubernetes.

The typical deployment runs nine OpenStack services, with 16 percent running 12 or more services. Among the projects of greatest interest to users and those likely to see strong future adoption Designate, Magnum, Trove and Manila top the list, with interest in Kolla and Barbican also up significantly.

Analyze the results yourself

The community is invited to explore the User Survey data and answer their own questions via a live survey analysis tool. It offers an online dashboard, six global filter categories, and three data sets (2015, 2016, 2017) and is available at http://www.openstack.org/analytics.

This dashboard captures live data as survey responses are logged. This survey report is based on data collected between Jan. 26, 2017 and March 1, 2017, but the online dashboard includes surveys answered throughout 2017. As a result, online results might differ from this report due to different collection periods.

Heidi Joy Tretheway has spearheaded the User Survey on behalf of the OpenStack Foundation since August 2015. The survey is developed in collaboration with the User Committee, the User Survey Work Group and an independent data scientist. Contact Heidi Joy at [email protected].

Cover Photo // CC BY NC