Despite the lack of widespread adoption, OpenStack has become one of the major battlegrounds among IT’s biggest players – with the likes of Red Hat, CentOS and HP all betting big on the open-source architecture overwhelming IT sooner rather than later.

So it’s mildly surprising to learn that these so-called ‘major players’ have been left for dead by little ol’ Ubuntu. That’s according to a new survey of OpenStack users, carried out by the OpenStack Foundation, which found that Ubuntu is by far and away the most widely used OS with OpenStack, ahead of CentOS in second place. But that’s not the most eye-opening statistic to come from this survey – more interesting is who’s using Ubuntu and why, and what that says about OpenStack’s evolution.

OpenStack gathered a total of 1,780 responses in its survey from 512 companies, ranging from small businesses with fewer than 20 employees, all the way up to super-sized enterprises with 10,000 or more workers. But around 50 percent of OpenStack users surveyed had 100 employees or less, suggesting that smaller companies are perhaps more willing than sprawling enterprises to bet their future on the open-source cloud.

Also intriguing was the broad mix of companies represented. Users come from a range of industries, from academia to retail, telecommunications to media – no single sector was dominant. Indeed, companies that identified themselves as being in the “information technology” only accounted for 17.4 percent of all users.

Telecommunications companies account for just 1.8 percent of all users, which might raise a few eyebrows. Several OpenStack vendors claim their version of the cloud software is “carrier grade”, because the industry is seen as something of a ‘proving ground’ for OpenStack’s capabilities, yet it’s clearly not a major part of its user base. Saying that, those telecommunications firms that do use OpenStack are pretty big – Deutsche Telekom being the most obvious example.

As far as deployments go, OpenStack versions Essex, Folsom, Grizzly and Havana were the most popular. The most recent release, Icehouse, barely figured – which suggests upgrades are considered to be more trouble than they’re worth.

As for their reasons for deploying OpenStack, most companies cited being able to avoid vendor lock-in and reduce costs. These two responses seem to be correlated, as any company that wants to save money would naturally look for a way to avoid vendor lock-in. In any case, Red Hat would do well to pay heed to this if it doesn’t want to alienate potential customers.

One last finding is that most OpenStack deployments have been relatively modest in scope and scale. In most cases, companies deployed between one to 100 instances, one to 100 cores, a maximum of 50 compute nodes, 10 to 100 TB of block storage, and between one and 10,000 objects. KVM was by far and away the hypervisor of choice, another reason to suggest that cost is a crucial factor for most OpenStack adopters.

This isn’t the first time the OpenStack Foundation has carried out a major survey of its users. A previous survey in October 2013 revealed very similar usage patterns. That leads us to assume, if OpenStack does indeed take off, it’ll take its time getting there.

Main photo credit: ahockley via photopin cc