Nobody's Using OpenStack, Huh? Guess Again.
Now that the dust from the OpenStack summit in Atlanta has settled, it's probably a good time to take a look at the other semi-annual OpenStack tradition, the OpenStack user survey. This cycle's survey, known as the Juno survey because this was technically the Juno design summit, gave us the following interesting statistics:
Despite the industry's general feeling that there aren't any actual OpenStack Deployments, a total of 1780 responses from 512 companies shed light on 506 of them, with 297 of those running actual production clouds. Approximately one third of these deployments are running Havana, Icehouse, or trunk, with most of the rest in the Essex through Grizzly range, probably due to difficulties in upgrading these clouds to newer releases.
More than half (53%) of all deployments are at companies with more than 100 employees, and almost a quarter (24%) are at enterprises with more than 5000 employees. While many production deployments would still be considered small, almost 20% are serving more than 1,000 instances, with 9 deployments showing more than 10,000 instances. The top business driver was avoiding vendor lock-in, with cost-savings and operational efficiency right behind.
Here are some relevant facts:
Flexibility of underlying components remains a top business driver
ESX is now the second most popular hypervisor in proof-of-concept and production clouds, after KVM
Ubuntu remains the top operating system, used in 54% of production clouds.
RHEL has doubled its popularity as a host OS since last year, and is currently used in 12% of production clouds.
Puppet is still the most popular deployment tool, with Devstack in second place for Dev/QA and PoC clouds, and Chef for production.
In addition, the survey showed a larger influence from Operators, with an emphasis on giving them a larger role in future versions.
