OpenStack Gets Boost From Hybrid Cloud
Multiple cloud deployments are boosting adoption and revenues for private clouds, concludes a batch of new OpenStack surveys.
OpenStack deployments are predicted to rise at a 30-percent annual clip over the next five years to an estimated $6.7 billion in revenue by 2021 as production deployments grow and the platform benefits directly from the shift to hybrid cloud rollouts, according to a market analyst.
As OpenStack developers make progress toward addressing installation problems, "OpenStack [has become] more shrink-wrapped and risk is reduced for enterprise use," 451 Research noted in a study released during this week's OpenStack Summit.
The market researcher, which pegs 2017 OpenStack revenues at $2.55 billion, said 61 percent of enterprises it surveyed are using the hybrid cloud approach. Hence, it forecasts that OpenStack private cloud revenues will exceed public cloud deployments of OpenStack by 2018, sooner than expected.
OpenStack, which has endured teething problems, is increasingly seen as benefitting from the embrace of hybrid clouds as enterprises seek to avoid cloud vendor lock-in. "Certain verticals and regions that are less enthusiastic about exclusively using hyper-scalers also present a growth area for OpenStack," 451 Research concluded.
Along with easier installation, 451 Research said OpenStack deployments are being boosted in emerging markets such as China, where the Ministry of Information and Information Technology is promoting the platform. "The platform was once limited to
mostly development/testing and proof-of-concept deployments, but there are now mission-critical workloads on OpenStack across nearly all enterprise verticals and regions," the market researcher reported Monday (Nov. 6).
Separately, OpenStack proponents said the cloud platform also is tapping into the steady enterprise multi-cloud strategies. For example, a user survey released this week found that 48 percent of deployments are "interacting with another cloud," the OpenStack Foundation noted.
The adoption survey also found that nearly half of all deployments reported using infrastructure services to manage applications running on OpenStack clouds. Meanwhile, the Kubernetes container orchestrator remains the top application framework on OpenStack. According to 451 Research, "some of the most innovative and progressive OpenStack deployments feature the use of container technology such as Docker and Kubernetes."
To date, revenue from OpenStack deployments was traced "overwhelmingly" from cloud providers offering multi-tenant infrastructure services. The market researcher said OpenStack growth is shifting towards the private cloud space faster than previously expected.
Another survey released by Cloudify during this week's OpenStack summit found that 51 percent of those polled said they are deploying more than one cloud. Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) was the most popular multi-cloud combination. The second most popular cloud combination was AWS and OpenStack.
