Tell us how you use OpenStack: the OpenStack User Survey

Anecdotal information is nice, but there's nothing like a good user study to tell us what's really going on in the OpenStack industry.  Every six months, the OpenStack Foundation launches the OpenStack User Survey, releasing the results at the OpenStack Summit.  The latest survey launched this week, with the results to be announced at the OpenStack Summit in Paris in November.

The survey addresses topics such as what deployment tools are in use, what OpenStack releases are in play, and for what (for example, production versus proof of concept), and operating systems being used.  This survey also touches on topics of current interest, such as developer issues (asking what development languages respondents used to interact with the OpenStack API) and hybrid cloud (asking what other systems respondents interact with).

In the spring of 2014, results showed that more than half (53%) of the 506 deployments shown were at companies with more than 100 employees, and almost a quarter (24%) are at enterprises with more than 5000 employees.  Large deployments were also starting to show, with almost 20% of deployments serving more than 1,000 instances, and 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.  In addition, the survey showed a larger influence from Operators, with an emphasis on giving them a larger role in future versions.

The OpenStack community values these results as a way to make sure that we're heading in the right direction, so please take a moment to respond to the current OpenStack User Survey for yourself at the OpenStack Foundation's website.  The deadline for responses is October 7, 2014.