OpenStack Reviews Mixed in Latest Survey
As OpenStack users align around its standard APIs for deploying cloud infrastructure, adoption of application container technologies on OpenStack platforms continues to generated the most buzz in the latest OpenStack user survey released this week.
Still, the survey found that OpenStack deployments remain complex and the technology brings with it a steep learning curve before users can reap its benefits and gain a return on the investment.
Cost savings remain the key business driver for adopting OpenStack, with two-thirds of survey respondents citing cost as their top priority. While avoiding vendor lock-in remains a key reason for adopting open platforms like OpenStack, 97 percent of respondents said a growing priority is standardizing on the same open platform and APIs underpinning networks of public and private clouds.
(Respondents ranked their top five priorities, skewing survey results toward OpenStack standardization. Standardization was ranked fifth by 71 percent of respondents while, overall, while avoiding vendor lock-in was ranked higher with most respondents.)
Underlying these priorities were the desire to boost operational efficiencies while getting business application out the door faster, the OpenStack survey found.
As OpenStack deployments gain momentum, respondents also cited additional drivers, including cloud-native application development, "market demand for OpenStack compatibility" and a friendlier DevOps environment in which infrastructure operations are automated so developers can focus on faster application deployment.
Still, OpenStack deployment and operations remain complex, the survey acknowledged. "There are definitely still maturity and complexity issues with OpenStack," one respondent stressed. Said another critic: "OpenStack lacks far too many core components for anything other than very specialized deployments."
Another criticism identified in the OpenStack survey was project inconsistency. "OpenStack has become a sprawling mess of projects, with quality that is variable [or] inconsistent," according to one IT manager. Another agreed: "OpenStack has gotten too convoluted and bloated with projects." Those misgivings undermine assertions that OpenStack is gaining traction as a standard cloud platform.
Hence, some users called for more automation tools to ease and speed up OpenStack deployments. With that in mind, OpenStack pioneer Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) has released a managed private cloud service that integrates software, hardware and services for private clouds hosted in a customer's datacenter, a third-party facility or a Rackspace datacenter. The managed service also includes computing, networking and storage.
Meanwhile, OpenStack users view the platform as suited to running emerging technologies like application containers. Seventy percent of survey respondents cited containers as of greatest interest (the total was actually 6 percentage points lower than the previous OpenStack user survey). That view may reflect improving container security as the technology shifts to production.
Software-defined networking and network functions virtualization followed on the list of emerging technologies along with running containers on bare metal.
Forty-three percent of respondents to the OpenStack survey identified themselves as "cloud architects" followed by "cloud operators" or system administrators (41 percent). Application developers made up 30 percent of those polled. More than two-thirds of those surveyed work in the IT sector.
The survey sponsors claimed the number OpenStack "detractors" is declining as deployment challenges and operation complexity are slowly being overcome. Only 11 percent of respondents said they would not recommend OpenStack while 52 percent called themselves "promoters" of the platform.
