OpenStack production deployments increased significantly in the last year, according to a survey of 150 information technology decision makers and professionals carried out by Red Hat Inc.

Red Hat’s annual poll found that 43 percent of respondents have deployed the cloud platform in production, compared to just 16 percent one year ago. The company reckons the increase reflects efforts by the community to address complexity and deployment issues that were previously known to have been a major roadblock to adoption.

The study also noted that the steep learning curve for deploying OpenStack is being addressed as a growing number of engineers become certified to operate the platform. In addition, Red Hat cited cloud native application development as another driving force in enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

Separately, Red Hat announced that Produban Servicios Informáticos Generales S.L., the IT services arm of the Spanish bank Grupo Santander, has deployed its OpenShift container platform in a deal that represents one of the first production deployments of the Kubernetes container orchestrator running on OpenStack.

Red Hat cited this particular deal as evidence that application development use cases are one of the main factors driving production deployments of the OpenStack platform. Its survey backs this up, as two-thirds of respondents confirmed that they are currently using, or plan to use platform-as-a-service offerings with OpenStack soon. According to Red Hat that’s evidence of big interest among enterprises in using these complementary technologies.

“Adding another layer of importance to the interplay of OpenStack and PaaS is the growth of Linux containers, particularly among developers,” the company said. “As containerized applications emerge as a new workload type, OpenStack is a prime deployment environment among respondents. Only four percent of respondents are not considering containers on OpenStack, while fifty-seven (57) percent of respondents said that they are already using or plan to use containers on OpenStack, with the remainder undecided.”

Red Hat’s survey also looked at some of the factors preventing enterprises from deploying OpenStack in production, and found that many distributions lack effective cloud management tools for private and hybrid deployments. As a result, customers are increasingly turning to third-party management tools for monitoring workload performance.

The survey also found a growing desire for the ability to migrate virtualized and other workloads across OpenStack. Some 67 percent of respondents indicated that workload portability was a key feature lacking in most OpenStack distributions.

All in all, Red Hat argues that its survey shows OpenStack has navigated past early obstacles in its path to enterprise adoption, and is now ready for prime time. It’s a similar argument to that made by proponents of container deployments.

“There are distinct needs that still [must] be addressed, namely unified management and ensuring strong support for Linux containers, but overall, OpenStack is now beyond the proof-of-concept phase and ready to support mission-critical operations,” the Red Hat survey concluded.