From OpenStack Summit, Red Hat Reports That the Deployment Era is Here

As noted here yesterday, OpenStack is here to stay in enterprises. A new study by 451 Research analysts shows that about 72 percent of OpenStack-based clouds are between 1,000 and 10,000 cores and three fourths choose OpenStack to increase operational efficiency and app deployment speed.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Red Hat is out with very notable results from its polling of its OpenStack user base. Its study found that production deployments increased hugely in the last year, according to a survey of 150 information technology decision makers and professionals carried out by Red Hat.

The results stand in sharp contrast to Red Hat's results from last year, which showed that many enteprises were still in the evaluation stage. According to the company:

[Beyond indications] of a doubling of OpenStack production deployments from a year ago, trendlines indicate that:

OpenStack is critical infrastructure for application development, especially with containers

Built-in management tools aren’t doing the job by themselves

Customers want workload portability across OpenStack and other infrastructures

Organizations are looking for strong technical support

Not only have production deployments increased, but the use cases are growing as well, Red Hat reports. The bulk of respondents (66 percent) are now using, or planning to use, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with their OpenStack deployments. This is a jump over last year’s survey, when just 54 percent of respondents were considering PaaS and OpenStack together, and shows the combined growth in interest of these complementary technologies.

In other Red hat news, the company said that Swisscom has selected Red Hat as its technology partner to help the company deliver a modern, agile, and highly scalable cloud platform. Deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization as the basis of its new cloud infrastructure, Swisscom has been able to develop and deliver new digital products faster and more efficiently.

Produban also announced that they have partnered with Red Hat to create what production deployments of Kubernetes and containers on OpenStack.

 Red Hat's results also note the following, regarding container trends and more:

Adding another layer of importance to the interplay of OpenStack and PaaS is the growth of Linux containers, particularly among developers. As containerized applications emerge as a new workload type, OpenStack is a prime deployment environment among respondents. Only four percent of respondents are not considering containers on OpenStack, while fifty-seven (57) percent of respondents said that they are already using or plan to use containers on OpenStack, with the remainder undecided.

Managing a private or hybrid cloud deployment is critical to production success, otherwise workload performance and associated resources can degrade, if not outright suffer. While OpenStack includes built-in management tools to help monitor these needs, the 2016 survey shows that respondents are branching out into third-party management technologies. The use of OpenStack’s built-in management tools remains roughly the same as last year (54 percent in 2016 vs. 51 percent in 2015), additional management and monitoring technologies are now being added to the mix, like:

Open source configuration management (used by 41 percent of respondents)

Cloud management platforms (used by 39 percent of respondents)

Monitoring and alerting tools (used by 47 percent of respondents)

Portability is a big deal to respondents, especially as the majority are running or plan to run OpenStack workloads across a variety of environments - this carries over to vendor solutions, as 67 percent of respondents rated portability as an important or very important feature in commercial OpenStack. Only 10 percent of respondents have or are planning OpenStack-only workloads, while traditional virtualization (28 percent), bare metal (37 percent), public clouds (29 percent) and other private clouds (35 percent) form the rest of the hybrid mix. As for the workloads themselves, respondents indicated a healthy mix of:

Existing virtual machines (61 percent), up from 52 percent in 2015, indicating a boost in traditional workloads being onboarded to OpenStack

New cloud-optimized workloads (64 percent)

New workload types (50 percent), like containerized and cloud-native applications

When it comes to buying commercial OpenStack, support, opens source leadership and certification matter to respondents. Seventy-three percent of respondents rate technical support of commercial offerings as very or most important, while more than 80 percent rate community leadership as at least somewhat important. Finally, the vendor ecosystem is a big deal, with 66 percent of respondents rating hardware and software certifications as very important or greater.