OpenStack production deployments more than double in 2016, Red Hat survey finds

Last year, we surveyed our customer base on their use of OpenStack - while interest was high, most of the respondents were still learning about OpenStack clouds or developing proof-of-concepts. In this year’s survey, however, conducted in September 2016, the results looked significantly different, with 43 percent of the global respondents stating that they are now using OpenStack in production, up from 16 percent a year ago.

More than indicating a doubling of OpenStack production deployments from a year ago, trendlines indicate that:

• OpenStack is critical infrastructure for application development, especially with containers
• Built-in management tools aren’t doing the job by themselves
• Customers want workload portability across OpenStack and other infrastructures
• Organizations are looking for strong technical support

Not only have production deployments increased, but the use cases are growing as well. The bulk of respondents (66 percent) are now using, or planning to use, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with their OpenStack deployments. This is a jump over last year’s survey, when just 54 percent of respondents were considering PaaS and OpenStack together, and shows the combined growth in interest of these complementary technologies.

Adding another layer of importance to the interplay of OpenStack and PaaS is the growth of Linux containers, particularly among developers. As containerized applications emerge as a new workload type, OpenStack is a prime deployment environment among respondents. Only four percent of respondents are not considering containers on OpenStack, while fifty-seven (57) percent of respondents said that they are already using or plan to use containers on OpenStack, with the remainder undecided.

Managing a private or hybrid cloud deployment is critical to production success, otherwise workload performance and associated resources can degrade, if not outright suffer. While OpenStack includes built-in management tools to help monitor these needs, the 2016 survey shows that respondents are branching out into third-party management technologies. The use of OpenStack’s built-in management tools remains roughly the same as last year (54 percent in 2016 vs. 51 percent in 2015), additional management and monitoring technologies are now being added to the mix, like:

• Open source configuration management (used by 41 percent of respondents)
• Cloud management platforms (used by 39 percent of respondents)
• Monitoring and alerting tools (used by 47 percent of respondents)

Portability is a big deal to respondents, especially as the majority are running or plan to run OpenStack workloads across a variety of environments - this carries over to vendor solutions, as 67 percent of respondents rated portability as an important or very important feature in commercial OpenStack. Only 10 percent of respondents have or are planning OpenStack-only workloads, while traditional virtualization (28 percent), bare metal (37 percent), public clouds (29 percent) and other private clouds (35 percent) form the rest of the hybrid mix. As for the workloads themselves, respondents indicated a healthy mix of:

• Existing virtual machines (61 percent), up from 52 percent in 2015, indicating a boost in traditional workloads being onboarded to OpenStack
• New cloud-optimized workloads (64 percent)
• New workload types (50 percent), like containerized and cloud-native applications

When it comes to buying commercial OpenStack, support, opens source leadership and certification matter to respondents. Seventy-three percent of respondents rate technical support of commercial offerings as very or most important, while more than 80 percent rate community leadership as at least somewhat important. Finally, the vendor ecosystem is a big deal, with 66 percent of respondents rating hardware and software certifications as very important or greater.

From a doubling in production deployments to the increased migration of traditional virtualized workloads, OpenStack’s enterprise future is certainly one of optimism. There are distinct needs that still need to be addressed, namely unified management and ensuring strong support for Linux containers, but overall, OpenStack is now beyond the proof-of-concept phase and ready to support mission-critical operations.

Methodology

Red Hat’s 2016 OpenStack enterprise adoption survey polled more than 150 IT decision makers and professionals from around the world, commissioned by Red Hat through TechValidate. Respondents spanned industries - including banking, education, professional services, telecommunications, computer hardware and software - and came from organizations ranging in size from small businesses and state and local governments (startups) to global 500 companies and other large enterprises.

^{Photo credit: Clouds, by theaucitron}