There's a continued acceleration of OpenStack usage across various industries and by service providers, according to two recent surveys.
OpenStack's ongoing popularity is being driven by service providers' adoption of NFV, an increased role in multi-cloud environments and the planned use of it for IoT and edge computing.
OpenStack's tenth user survey, which was released in November, found that users from 48% of the OpenStack cloud deployments were also interacting with another cloud, which indicated a continued move to multi-cloud environments. In the previous version of the OpenStack User Survey, 38% of the respondents said they were interacting with another cloud.
Despite a decrease from the last survey -- from 58% to 48% -- Amazon Web Services was still the cloud provider of choice in regards to interacting with OpenStack deployments.
On a global basis, one-third of the OpenStack users surveyed this year were from Asia, an increase from 23% in 2016. OpenStack participation was particularly robust in China with the number of respondents increasing from 5% last year to 17% in 2017. OpenStack attributed the increased participation in Asia to translating the OpenStack User Survey into seven additional languages.
Among the verticals that used OpenStack the most, IT remained on top in the latest survey, although it slipped from 65% last year to 55% this year. Telecommunications usage increased from 13% last year to 15% this year. Finance, government/defense, retail/e-commerce, manufacturing/industrial and academic/research all increased their percentage points in the latest survey.
Communications service providers view OpenStack's open source and modular architecture as the main drivers for its use in edge deployments, according to a Heavy Reading survey. Service providers are also drawn to OpenStack because it enables them to offer their services at a faster rate.
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation