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Open Source Foundation Shares OpenStack Progress

Many CIOs know they must respond to the growing demand for public cloud services within their organizations. Building a private cloud with on-premises infrastructure is a path to progress, and OpenStack is the software platform.

The eighth User Survey conducted by the OpenStack Foundation demonstrates the maturity and broad adoption of the open source cloud platform, pointing to significant increases in the percentage of full production deployments.

The results of the latest survey findings were released by the foundation leadership, along with a new survey dashboard, now in beta, and six global filter categories enabling anyone to perform their own analysis on the data.

OpenStack Market Development Trends

The market study is intended to enable a better understanding of user attitudes, organization profiles, use cases, and technology choices surrounding OpenStack deployments. Data is shared with the OpenStack community to help make design decisions and plan for the future development agenda of the project.

Key OpenStack study findings include:
  • Seventy-two percent of OpenStack users cite bottom-line cost savings as their number one business driver, and the quest for top-line digital business innovation is also important for many.
  • The Net Promoter Score (NPS) for OpenStack deployments -- an indicator of user satisfaction --continues to tick up, eight points higher than a year ago.
  • Containers continues to lead the list of emerging technologies, as it has for three consecutive survey cycles. In the same question, interest in NFV and bare metal is significantly higher than a year ago.
  • Kubernetes shows growth as a container orchestration tool.
  • Seventy-one percent of deployments catalogued are in “production” versus in testing or proof of concept. This is a 20 percent increase year over year.
  • OpenStack is adopted by companies of every size. Nearly one-quarter of users are organizations smaller than 100 people.

Key Business Drivers for OpenStack Adoption

Users choose OpenStack for its ability to increase their operational efficiency -- 17 percent ranked this #1; 63 percent #2. Another key reason for OpenStack adoption is to accelerate their ability to innovate and compete by deploying applications faster -- 86 percent of respondents ranked this in the top three.

Users also commonly selected "avoiding vendor lock-in with an open platform and ecosystem with flexible underlying technology choices" and "standardizing on the same open platform and APIs that power a global network of public and private clouds" as top business drivers.

Other popular responses included attracting top technical talent and achieving security and/or privacy goals with control of their platform. That being said, finding skilled and experienced cloud architects is often the first challenge, and obtaining the compensation budget for their salary requirement is the second.

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