OpenStack Adoption on a Torrid Pace

What’s Driving Hybrid Cloud Adoption?

Over the next 2 years respondents predicted hybrid cloud growth would be the fastest (66%), followed by private cloud (55%) and public cloud (36%).  The use case driving hybrid cloud adoption is the desire, of 89% of those surveyed, to do development in the public cloud while hosting production workloads in their private cloud.  Key reasons for this approach include security (63%), data sovereignty (52%), performance related issues (52%) and cost (30%).    Many also wanted the freedom to place workloads where they make the most sense in terms of cost and performance.   For example,  I/O intensive workloads can drive up the networking costs of public clouds quickly, while development projects are often short in duration and require less bandwidth which may make the public cloud more cost efficient.

Is OpenStack the Answer?

OpenStack is following an adoption curve very similar to Linux.  Initial implementations by industry heavyweights has given way to production environments in companies of all sizes.   In this survey, 23% of organizations were in production (up from 15% in 2015), with 37% in testing and 22% expected to do so within 12 months.   This means that 82% of respondents are either now using or planning to use OpenStack.   The reasons for this rapid adoption are fairly well known:  flexibility (61%), reduced cost (52%), agility (47%), adaptability / integration (46%) and freedom of choice (44%).   OpenStack is one of the few platforms that enables them to combine legacy investments in hardware and software with leading-edge technologies including Platform as a Service (PaaS), containers, workload automation (including Kubernetes), and software-defined infrastructure.   Most of the latest innovations in IT are either introduced or available on OpenStack.

Why is There a Perception that OpenStack is Difficult?

The majority of the respondents to this survey (82%) thought that deploying OpenStack was difficult.   I believe this is caused by two reasons:  1. They chose to download the upstream code and build it from scratch (55%) or 2.  Installation of OpenStack has been very difficult in the past and that experience has lingered.   Building your own distribution of OpenStack from the upstream code is not for the faint of heart.   It requires a rather large team of experts that can assemble all of the different pieces in a production-worthy environment.   Drivers from all of the hardware/software partners have to be tested and integrated.   Further, maintenance is a nightmare – OpenStack has a 6 month release cycle, so you’ll need to repeat this exercise frequently.    SUSE has made great strides in addressing these issues with award winning ease of installation and non-disruptive upgrades.

Conclusion:  Time to Include SUSE OpenStack Cloud on Your Short List of Technologies

OpenStack may no longer be the “shiny object” it once was, which conversely means that hype has given way to a cloud platform that has stabilized into a production-worthy environment.   Take control of your IT destiny by adopting the one platform that seamlessly integrates legacy and cloud-native architectures with no vendor lock-in.    SUSE OpenStack Cloud is the evolutionary path to your next generation Software Defined Data Center.  To learn more about SUSE OpenStack Cloud and the benefits our customers have gained, check out our new Total Economic Impact Study for SUSE OpenStack Cloud.