Increase in multi-cloud strategies sees higher OpenStack adoption

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 role in multi-cloud environments, NFV and IoT/edge computing.

Key Findings:

• In the OpenStack User Survey, respondents indicated that users from 48% 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% 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% of respondents said that OpenStack would be used to manage edge infrastructure.
• A Heavy Reading survey focused on telecom operators found that 96% 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% of organizations (up from 15 % in 2015). A total of 82% are using or plan to use OpenStack in the future.

The OpenStack Foundation's tenth User Survey was released today at the OpenStack Summit in Sydney.

Nearly 1,000 unique OpenStack deployments were completed in 2017, a 95% increase compared to 2016.

Nearly half (48%) of the survey respondents reported that users of their OpenStack deployment also interact with another cloud, demonstrating the multi-cloud trend highlighted by recent OpenStack case studies published by Workday, GE Healthcare and Adobe Advertising Cloud.

SUSE's survey found that OpenStack is in production in 23 % of organizations (up from 15% in 2016). In addition, 37% are testing and 22% expect to do so in the next 12 months, meaning a total of 82% are using or plan to use OpenStack.

Likewise, Heavy Reading's survey reports that engagement with OpenStack is on the rise, with 84% of respondents saying they are actively engaged with or following the project, up from 74% from last year, and the percent contributing directly to the project grew from 17% to 21%.

The OpenStack User Survey reports growth of users among mainstream, non-IT industries, indicated by a significant increase in responses among finance industry and government users from 2016 to 2017, in addition to increases in industries like telecom and research.

OpenStack User Survey participation grew significantly in Asia, and particularly in China, which comprised 17% of overall respondents in 2017 as compared to 5% in 2016.

Likely contributing to this increase was the availability of the survey in seven additional languages for the first time, which enabled more users in Asia to take the survey.

Cloudify reports that half of the organizations that responded to its survey are managing more than one cloud, with close to 9% of them deployed across five clouds or more.

The most popular two-cloud combination is AWS and Azure, suggesting that organizations are using public/public multi-clouds in order to avoid vendor lock-in.

The second most popular two-cloud combination is AWS and OpenStack.

According to SUSE's survey, the preferred cloud services for business-critical workloads are private cloud (43%) and hybrid cloud (42%).

The use of cloud is expected to grow over the next two years; this is particularly the case for hybrid (66%) and private cloud (55%), with 36% seeing public cloud growing in this timeframe.

Eighty-nine percent of SUSE's survey respondents would ideally like to go from development in public cloud to production in their own private cloud.

Key reasons are security (63%), data sovereignty (52%) and performance issues (52%), followed by cost (30%).

According to Heavy Reading, a large majority (84%) of CSPs say that OpenStack is essential or important to their company's success.

CSPs who are already implementing their NFV and cloud strategies are even more positive, with 96% and 85% respectively saying it is essential or important.

In SDxCentral's 2017 Edge Computing and MEC Report, 87 % of respondents selected OpenStack as the software that will be used to manage edge infrastructure. Verizon is among the users who are deploying OpenStack at the edge.

In the OpenStack User Survey, production usage of Ironic bare metal services saw significant growth—increasing from 9 % to 20 % since the last report six months ago.

This increase is especially notable, as more users such as eBay and Commonwealth Bank are running container orchestration frameworks on OpenStack bare metal.

Nearly half of all deployments reported using a PaaS or CaaS tool to manage applications on top of their OpenStack clouds, and Kubernetes remains the top application framework on OpenStack.