SUSE Survey Finds There Just Aren't Enough OpenStack Skills to Go Around

There is brand new evidence that a lack of workers with OpenStack skills may be holding the cloud platform back, especially at enterprises. SUSE LLC’s survey on OpenStack adoption trends reports that over eighty percent of enterprises are either planning to, or have already, implemented OpenStack as a cloud computing solution within their organizations. That means the need and desire is there. However, more than half of all organizations that have tried to deploy OpenStack say they’ve failed to do so due to a lack of skills.

Here is more on the findings, and our latest review of quick ways to pick up OpenStack skills.

"We believe the overall findings speak very positively about the level of trust and confidence that enterprises have in OpenStack," said Ralf Flaxa, SUSE vice president of engineering. "Understandably, there are clear concerns among customers about how their cloud infrastructure should be integrated and managed."

Notably, 96 percent of respondents to the SUSE survey believe there are business advantages to implementing an open source private cloud. The most common reasons for adopting private clouds were to reduce costs and/or because of budget constraints (67 percent), and to increase agility/innovation (77 percent) – advantages associated with open source solutions.

However, as enterprises increasingly look to OpenStack for their private cloud investments, they are also wary of challenges and complications, including:

- High degree of difficulty: Half of all enterprises that tried to implement an OpenStack cloud have failed, and 65 percent of companies report they have found the implementation experience difficult. In addition, nearly half (44 percent) plan to download and install OpenStack software themselves, potentially adding to the degree of difficulty.

- Vendor lock-in constraints: 92 percent of respondents have concerns about vendor lock-in when it comes to choosing a private cloud infrastructure solution.

- Skills shortage: 86 percent of respondents said the lack of skills in the market is making their companies reluctant to pursue private cloud. In addition, 78 percent of companies that have yet to adopt private cloud are deterred by the skills shortage.

Al Sadowski, research director, Service Providers, for 451 Research, said, "Due to the complex nature of the projects, managed services and OpenStack distributions are increasingly the deployment choice for those users that remain supportive of the platform after struggling to find success with the do-it-yourself approach. We continue to see OpenStack becoming the de facto open source option for deploying private clouds."

 We've rounded up some of the best ways to gain OpenStack skills and certification, and you can find the roundups here and here.