Survey Finds, Again, that Ubuntu Is the Most Common OpenStack Platform

Last week was OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, and there were enough big headlines to guarantee that OpenStack is going to remain one of the biggest technology stories of this year. In conjunction with the summit, there was a survey on how organizations are implementing OpenStack, what platforms they're using with it, and more. And, as was found in a previous survey done by the OpenStack Foundation, respondents reported that Ubuntu is by far the most prevalently used operating system with OpenStack.

For the latest survey, there were 1,780 responses, representing 506 deployments of OpenStack in 512 countries. Small and large organizations participated in the survey. Notably, the respondents said that they were using the Essex, Folsom, Grizzly and Havana distributions of OpenStack, but very few reported using the latest Icehouse version.  

As has been true before, organizations reported that they chose OpenStack to save money and avoid vendor lock-in.  These themes were emphasized by Canonical at OpenStack Summit.

Within the OpenStack ecosystem, a previous OpenStack Foundation survey found that users go with Ubuntu 55 percent of the time as their host operating system, a surprising statistic that Matt Asay discussed in a post.  In the latest survey, the 55 percent figure rose to more than 60 percent. CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux were the next most common operating sytems used with OpenStack.

You can find many more details on the survey in an online slideshow. Here, for example, is a snapshot of OpenStack deployments by geographical region: