The statistics and facts mentioned in this blog are retrieved from surveys conducted by OpenStack. Nearly 60% of survey respondents with deployments identified their role as either a cloud operator or a cloud architect. However, 46% of respondents reported having more than one role in their organization.

Respondents to the latest OpenStack User Survey represent 63 countries. OpenStack is serving as a strong infrastructure solution for both developing companies and established enterprises and is proven at enterprise scale. A diagram of the organizational size of OpenStack users shows companies of all sizes.

OpenStack users were asked to select their top reasons for choosing OpenStack and to rank these adoption drivers in terms of priority. “Increasing operational efficiency” and “accelerating the ability to innovate” top the list of reasons why organizations choose OpenStack as their cloud infrastructure platform. We see these top reasons unchanged for the OpenStack surveys in the past years.

OpenStack adapts and grows with emerging technology, making it an innovation engine for companies as their platforms develop. This year again, containers and bare metal orchestration are technologies of particular interest to OpenStack users, with containers commanding a lead as the number 1 technology.

Another interesting fact is that most OpenStack clouds, make use of Ceph as a storage backend. Although OpenStack offers strong support and integration with existing hardware storage solutions, Ceph still is the way to go for most OpenStack users.

The fact that OpenStack is open source means that anyone that chooses to use it, can access the source code, make changes, and share these with the community. One of the key benefits of this model is that the source code can then be checked by a much larger set of people than proprietary code, which is restricted to its owners. Governed by the OpenStack Foundation, there are more than 34,000 individual contributors and over 550 companies that participate in the project.

Although IT remains the largest industry category overall, the OpenStack user base continues to expand in non-IT industries. The largest increase was witnessed in financial services, with notable gains seen in government. At this moment the two largest non-IT industry users are telecommunications and academic research.

So, there you have some fast facts and statistics on the OpenStack project. I’m curious if you recognize these numbers. Also, please let me know when you have another particular interest within your OpenStack infrastructure.