OpenStack, the free, open-source cloud computing software platform, is making good progress in the enterprise, staking its claim as a mature infrastructure technology platform with growing adoption rates and more production deployments than ever before.

That’s according to a new user survey that shows almost two-thirds of deployments are now handling production workloads, while most users have adopted infrastructure services such as Cinder for block storage, Neutron for networking and Nova for compute. It also reveals a 44 percent increase in total OpenStack deployments over the past year, with an increase in the average size of cloud deployments.

Meanwhile, open-source components such as the Swift object storage provisioning tool are also growing, with 16 percent of users provisioning over a petabyte of object storage, four times the number from a year ago.

OpenStack’s continued growth parallels that of application containers and microservices, and the survey suggests that for many users the technologies go hand in hand. Some 65 percent of users are currently running OpenStack services in application containers, with the majority using the Docker engine. Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform, is being run by 47 percent of OpenStack users.

“The large proportion of clouds in production demonstrates the maturity of OpenStack, while the substantial influx of clouds in proof-of-concept and test stages predicts healthy growth for the future,” the survey authors concluded.

One reason for OpenStack’s continued popularity is the freedom it affords enterprises, the survey found. The survey authors noted that many OpenStack users place a premium on “accelerating the organization’s ability to innovate [while] avoiding vendor-lock in.” In previous years, users identified increased operational efficiency and cost savings as their main priorities.

The primary workloads being run on OpenStack are cloud infrastructure services, according to 44 percent of survey respondents. That’s followed by software development and testing, which came in second with 40 percent.

Other popular workloads cited by respondents include database and web services at 27 percent each, archiving and storage backup. Big data analytics is yet another popular use case, with 21 percent of respondents saying they run Apache Hadoop or Apache Spark on OpenStack.

OpenStack’s latest user survey polled more than 1,400 users across 78 countries. The survey findings will be presented in greater detail at the OpenStack Summit in Boston May 8-11.

Images: OpenStack.org