Ubuntu's Server, Cloud Survey Reflects Trust in Private Clouds, OpenStack

The Ubuntu team is out with its annual Server and Cloud Survey results, and the survey  asked more than 5,800 Ubuntu users from six continents to share their experience of using Ubuntu server and cloud, as well as general cloud usage patterns and preferences.  The research showed that today there is a greater level of trust in cloud environments, including private clouds and trust in OpenStack.

The worldwide cloud market is projected to be worth $131 billion this year according to Gartner, and Linux is gaining influence on servers and in the cloud. The Ubuntu team's survey found that 64 percent of respondents are already deploying, or plan to deploy workloads to the cloud. And 55 percent consider cloud environments ready for mission-critical workloads - up from 22% in 2012. Specific types of mission-critical workloads enterprises are deploying to the cloud include; Web server workloads (51 percent), database (44 percent), backup (42 percent), file server (30 percent).

"These findings show greater trust in the cloud, especially as 59 percent are using such environments for production now, rather than just test and development (60 percent) or extra server capacity (53 percent)," the survey findings report.

The report also notes:

"We found that 41 percent of respondents are currently using private clouds, while just 27 percent are using public clouds and 15 percent using hybrid clouds. And, while it could be argued that hybrid is tied in with public cloud usage, the projections for the type of cloud infrastructure expected to be built over the next year show private infrastructure leading the charge at 52 percent."

"With so many cloud options these days, it’s also encouraging to see OpenStack being selected as the private cloud infrastructure of choice with 42 percent using OpenStack, compared to 30 percent using vCloud. And, because most OpenStack clouds run on Ubuntu, it’s no surprise that 75 percent have near-term plans to deploy more Ubuntu servers and 70 percent consider Ubuntu as a viable platform for their cloud-based deployments. It’s clear that the private cloud space will be one to watch, especially as both OpenStack and Ubuntu become increasingly prominent in enterprise settings."

The 2013 Server and Cloud Survey also shows that 24 percent of respondents are using Puppet as their service orchestration tool and 16 percent are using Juju, which is much newer to the market. Even more notably, though, almost half of respondents (49.3 percent) say that they are using no service orchestration tool at all, which could imply a market opportunity.