Private cloud adoption and revenues are being boosted by growth in the number of multi-cloud deployments, according to a new OpenStack survey carried out by 451 Research Inc.

The survey, which was released to coincide with this week’s OpenStack Summit taking place in Sydney, Australia, predicts that deployments of the OpenStack platform will rise at a 30 percent annual clip over the next five years. By 2021, OpenStack will drive an estimated $6.7 billion in revenue, up from $2.55 billion this year.

That’s thanks to a rise in production deployments that will come about as more enterprises shift towards a hybrid cloud strategy. 451 Research noted that OpenStack’s developers have made significant progress addressing the technology’s installation problems. “OpenStack [has become] more shrink-wrapped and risk is reduced for enterprise use,” the research firm said.

According to the study, 61 percent of OpenStack users are following a hybrid cloud strategy. As such, 451 Research said OpenStack’s private cloud revenues will surpass its public cloud revenues within the next year, which is far sooner than was expected.

“Certain verticals and regions that are less enthusiastic about exclusively using hyper-scalers also present a growth area for OpenStack,” 451 Research said, noting that many enterprises are choosing a hybrid cloud approach as a way to avoid vendor lock-in.

The research also found that OpenStack is benefiting from serious adoption in China and other emerging markets. China’s Ministry of Information and Information Technology is one of the country’s biggest users, the researchers said.

“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,” 451 Research said.

Other highlights from the survey include the fact that almost half of all OpenStack deployments use infrastructure services to manage their cloud-hosted applications. It also found that Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform, is the most-used application framework.

New focus on integration

Also at the OpenStack Summit on Monday, the technology foundation that leads OpenStack’s development called on users to help boost its adoption. The OpenStack Foundation said it was asking users to share code they’ve written to integrate OpenStack with other tools and infrastructure, so others can benefit from the work they’ve done.

The Foundation said now is the time to think about increasing adoption, as it believes the OpenStack software is ready for prime time following years of work aimed at making it easier to install and stable enough for production deployments. However, the Foundation said, OpenStack lacks connectors to most other open-source technology projects and tools.

These connectors do exist, but the problem is most of them are in the possession of the users that created them. As such, the Foundation is asking users to open-source the code they’ve created in-house in order to benefit the OpenStack ecosystem as a whole.

“Collaboration across foundations and communities is essential for open source to reach its full potential,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “We need to support each other and make sure open technologies work well together in order to build user and ecosystem value around these shared assets.”

The Foundation is launching several initiatives to help with this. For one thing, it plans to create verified use case templates that explain common deployments of OpenStack and other tools. Container security and edge computing are two of the main targets, officials said.

The Foundation also announced the creation of an OpenLab, which is meant to “enable testing, reporting and development of tools and applications for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.” Intel Corp. and Huawei Technologies Ltd. are both working alongside the foundation to further this effort.

Finally, the foundation said it was launching something called the “OpenStack Public Cloud Passport,” which is designed to help prospective users “quickly experience the freedom, performance and interoperability of open source infrastructure.”

Image: OpenStack Foundation