Private-cloud implementations of OpenStack will experience a revenue CAGR of 30% between now and 2021, reaching revenues of $6 billion and surpassing income generated by providers offering OpenStack on public cloud infrastructure in 2018.
The figures, which come from 451 Research's OpenStack Pulse report, offer important insights into the adoption of OpenStack as a cloud technology, revealing that many of the challenges previously experienced by the industry have now been addressed, including installation issues and slow updates. This means more businesses are willing to move to using OpenStack over other technologies, causing adoption to grow faster than 451 Research previously predicted.
"OpenStack has solidified its position as the leading open source option for building private and public cloud environments but it is no longer the shiny new toy in the industry that torch has been passed to containers and microservices," said Al Sadowski, research vice president at 451 Research.
451 Research added that although OpenStack offers a lot for those using private clouds, public clouds, DevOps and internal environments for developers, big-data applications, machine learning and edge computing, some businesses are still hesitant to adopt it.
Compared to AWS and Microsoft Azure, the company explained some businesses think the technology falls short in comparison, which is the next hurdle OpenStack needs to overcome.
There is also a possibility containers could overtake OpenStack, with a lot of hype around the new technology's functionality compared to open source. But 451 Research doesn't think the two environments necessarily have to work independently; support for container technologies with Docker and Kubernetes within OpenStack could an even more efficient development stack.
"While there is no clear answer yet about OpenStack coexistence with containers, it is worth noting that containers and container management are nascent markets in terms of production use cases," Sadowski added.
