OpenStack Foundation is upbeat about user participation in its cloud endeavor, despite a recent cutback on a related project from key sponsor Intel.
According to OpenStack's ninth user survey, the open source cloud project had gained 44 percent more deployments and input from 22 percent more organizations than a year ago. The average age of a deployment was 1.68 years, with 56 percent of deployments launched either this year or in 2016, and a typical deployment runs nine projects. More than 1,300 users spanning 476 cities and 78 countries participated in the latest biannual survey, which featured responses from 583 deployments logged between January 26 and March 1.
The survey found that 32 percent of users have 10,000 employees or more, while 25 percent have fewer than 25 employees. Also, 16 percent of deployments provisioned more than a petabyte of object storage, compared to 4 percent a year ago, and 33 percent reported storing 100,000 objects or more, as opposed to 13 percent who did so last year.
The median user site, the foundation said, runs 61 to 80 percent of their infrastructure on OpenStack. At larger installations, with clouds of 1,000 cores or more, the median user runs 81 to 100 percent of their overall infrastructure on OpenStack. Containers remain the top emerging technology of interest, with 65 percent those running OpenStack services inside containers using the Docker runtime and 47 percent of those using containers to orchestrate apps using Kubernetes.
But OpenStack's reported good fortunes when it comes to its user participation are overshadowed by Intel's recent decision to discontinue its participation in OpenStack Innovation Center, a joint venture with Rackspace intended to spur OpenStack adoption through platform enhancements (the Innovation Center never actually was a Foundation project). The company would not comment on how much money it was contributing to the project, but as a result of Intel's decision, Rackspace has eliminated 45 positions related to the effort.
Still, cloud computing analyst Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions remains confident in OpenStack, saying it remains one of the best lock-in hedges for cloud computing even as it enters maturity. "OpenStack may be taken for granted by some vendors, but it should remain an essential platform for enterprise cloud architects for some years to come."