OpenStack Summit: Private Cloud Dominates Customer Deployments

Written by Chris Talbot 1
November 8, 2013

The OpenStack Foundation unveiled the results of a survey of OpenStack users that shows when it comes to the open source cloud computing platform, private cloud is king.

The OpenStack Foundation unveiled the results of an OpenStack user study that was conducted during October of this year. And according to the survey results, private cloud production instances are far outnumbering public cloud instances.

Overall, OpenStack is turning into a big hit with the private cloud userbase, far outshining the public cloud space.

The OpenStack Foundation surveyed 822 people, representing 387 OpenStack deployments and 539 companies. The majority of the survey respondents resided in the United States, but responses were spread around the world, including in China, India, France, Australia, Brazil and several other nations.

Here are a few of the highlights from the survey:

Organizations using OpenStack varied in size, and there was no specific company size that dominated the survey results. For instance, 26 percent of respondents represented companies of one to 20 employees, whereas 21 percent represented companies with more than 10,000 employees.
Information technology was the most dominant industry, according to the survey results. Of the respondents, 63 percent came from IT companies. The next highest market demographic was academic research, which made up 11 percent of respondents. But OpenStack is being used by a variety of industries, including telecommunications (7 percent), film/media (3 percent), government/defense (2 percent), manufacturing/industrial (2 percent), retail (1 percent), health care (1 percent) and finance (1 percent).
The top business driver was cost savings, followed by operational efficiency, open source technology, avoiding vendor lock-in and the flexibility of underlying technology choices.
The most-used OpenStack version is now Grizzly, which replaced Folsom as the most popular choice between April and November.
Most organizations using OpenStack are either in proof of concept or dev/QA stages, with the least amount actually using OpenStack in production.

The entire slideshow presentation is online, for those interested in taking a look at the results in more detail.