OpenStack exceeds 40 million cores in production • The Register

OpenStack is “alive and healthy,” according to the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), which claims deployments are up 60 percent this year compared to 2021. However, much of the growth appears to have come from a small number of existing users, many of whom are telecoms.

The open source cloud framework has now delivered an alphabet of releases with the arrival of the “Zed” version last month, but the perception is that the momentum behind the platform has waned since the heady days of early releases – when supporters expected it to take a significant share of the private and public cloud markets.

Perhaps to counteract this, the 2022 OpenStack User Survey strikes an optimistic tone, claiming that OpenStack adoption has reached 40 million cores in production, a 60 percent increase over 2021, and that it is now in over 300 public cloud data centers around the world.

However, the report itself indicates that a significant portion of this growth in the number of cores in production deployments is attributable to the Million Core Club – a handful of companies that are the largest OpenStack adopters.

These include LINE, a Japan-based instant messaging service that has more than doubled its footprint to 4 million cores, HR and finance platform Workday, and China Mobile, China Unicom, Huawei and Walmart Labs.

However, deployment sizes vary widely, with more than half (56 percent) ranging from 100 to 10,000 cores. This group includes the Schwarz Group’s IT organization, including retailer Lidl, which has grown from 5,700 cores last year to 15,000 cores in production use.

The OIF report states that adoption of core services including Nova, Neutron, Keystone, Glance and Ironic remains high, which will come as no surprise to anyone as these provide the basic infrastructure services.

Users are now beginning to bring in additional services from the OpenStack portfolio such as Octavia and Magnum, which address load balancing and container orchestration, respectively, while enterprises are expanding to hybrid cloud environments and integration with Kubernetes, the report said.

This is reflected in the results, which show that the proportion of respondents running a hybrid cloud environment using OpenStack has increased, albeit slightly, from 77 percent to 80 percent. Almost half of production deployments are now running Octavia in production, it says, an 11 percent increase from last year.

Users running production workloads with Magnum have increased from 16 percent to 21 percent of those using OpenStack with Kubernetes to run containers.

The OpenInfra Foundation also claims that this year saw the launch of new data centers in regions where OpenStack hasn’t seen much adoption in the past, such as Africa, South America, and countries in Asia beyond Japan and China.

“Hype is nice, but substance endures, and as OpenStack deployments continue to grow in astounding numbers, the OpenStack community is proving that not only is it alive and well, but it also offers undeniable value to organizations,” said Thierry Carrez , general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation , in a statement accompanying the report.

Andrew Buss, senior research director at IDC in Europe, told us OpenStack had a mixed reception because it had proven complex to deploy and operate.

“The main user base were service providers and telcos, as well as some larger or more digitally oriented companies. Some of them are still excited about the platform as they’ve mastered the complexity, but we don’t see a shift towards conquering new markets,” he said.

OpenStack failed to convince many companies to adopt it as their infrastructure platform, and instead organizations, particularly in Europe, preferred to adopt on-premises versions of public cloud stacks that require less effort to manage and deploy hybrid cloud support require.

“Our results show that Microsoft Azure Stack is the most widely adopted, followed by Google Anthos and then VMware Cloud. All have the benefit of being able to run on standard OEM server kits from HPE, Dell and Lenovo, among others,” Buss said.

The 2022 OpenStack User Survey included over 300 deployments and feedback from over 430 respondents collected between August 2021 and August 2022. ®