)
Sixty-five percent of OpenStack deployments are now in production, 33 percent more than a year ago. Nearly 100 percent of community members said that “standardizing on the same open platform and APIs that power a global network of public and private clouds” was one of their top five reasons for choosing OpenStack.
Key Findings
- Users are aligning around OpenStack as it becomes the de facto open source enterprise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) API. Developers said they chiefly use OpenStack clients as their software development toolkit for the OpenStack API, though this top answer is seven points lower than the prior survey cycle, indicating increased use of the more stable software-defined networks (SDKs).
- Container technology continues to be a major interest for the OpenStack community, earning the most interest among emerging technologies, with 70 percent of respondents reporting interest in containers as a part of their OpenStack projects.
- Though there were few shakeups in deployment decisions, the use of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and container orchestration tools saw significant changes among the leading technology choices, with Kubernetes leading.
- Organizations of all sizes use OpenStack. Forty three percent of respondents reported working in organizations of fewer than 1,000 people.
- Deployments are rapidly adopting the two most recent releases of OpenStack at the time of the survey, Kilo and Liberty.
_Who rolls their own API? About 30 percent of survey respondents._
_Emerging technologies of interest to survey respondents. Multiple answers were accepted._
These and other findings are part of the seventh consecutive survey conducted by the OpenStack User Committee. The User Committee sounds out people working with OpenStack ahead of each Summit. These results are from voluntary surveys answered online; the opt-in survey is not an exhaustive catalog of OpenStack deployments, but provides valuable intelligence on usage patterns and technology decisions in real-world deployments. Survey responses were gathered from more than 1,600 users representing 1,111 organizations over a three-week period.
You can read the 60-page User Survey report as a .PDF [here](http://www.openstack.org/assets/survey/April-2016-User-Survey-Report.pdf) or check out past surveys [here.](https://www.openstack.org/user-survey/survey-2016-q1/landing)
Survey responses demonstrate how OpenStack’s mature and highly flexible platform has become an innovation engine for companies in diverse industries, enabling users to operate both legacy systems and cloud-native apps through a single framework, a benefit that is increasingly important, especially to enterprise users. OpenStack is unique in its ability to support organizations managing legacy IT workloads while also adopting agile IT systems to drive competitive advantage through rapid iteration of software development.
“Being a flexible framework to build on is the most important aspect of the OpenStack platform,” said one user from a global financial institution. “Also, being able to support both traditional and cloud-native workloads is very important because large enterprises don’t have the luxury of dropping their legacy applications and forklifting them into the microservices-type designs from day one. The benefits of the cloud are too great to only allow new workloads onto the platform.”
OpenStack has experienced accelerated adoption in the past year with more diverse and larger deployments, particularly as organizations have recognized the flexibility and agility that OpenStack offers.
_OpenStack Foundation senior marketing manager Heidi Joy Tretheway offers up these 10 insights from the User Survey._
Learn More about the User Survey at the OpenStack Summit
Findings from the User Survey will be discussed during a [session](https://www.openstack.org/summit/austin-2016/summit-schedule/events/9471?goback=1) at the OpenStack [Summit](https://www.openstack.org/summit/) Austin, April 25-29.
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