The State of the Open Source Cloud 2012

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER Executive Summary... 2 Methodology... 3 Survey Sample... 3 About Zenoss, Inc The State of the Open Source Cloud The Who, What & Where of Survey Respondents Virtualization Technologies Currently in Use Just How Open is the Cloud Today? Early Adopters of Open Cloud Considering the Open Cloud Open Cloud Naysayers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) The State of the Open Source Cloud 2012 Presented by Zenoss, Inc. The results of this survey were collected during the 3 rd quarter of 2012 from the Zenoss open source IT infrastructure monitoring community with regards to their usage of virtualization and cloud computing. 1

2 Executive Summary Zenoss conducted this survey during the 3rd quarter of 2012 to quantify and characterize current data center virtualization and cloud computing usage. 628 members of the Zenoss open source IT management community took part, representing everyone from CIOs to system administrators, architects, developers and network engineers. Virtualization is the new normal 94% of respondents indicated use of virtualization within their infrastructures VMware (in use by 74% of respondents) remains the dominant hypervisor, with the rest of the top 4 being open source Linux KVM (23%), Microsoft Hyper-V (20%) and open source Xen (18%). Maturity hampers the deployment of clouds based on open source technology 83% of respondents are NOT using an open source cloud Maturity (39%), Lack of Support (31%), and Security (29%) were the most commonly selected reasons why respondents are not using an open source cloud. Early adopters of the open source cloud give us a sneak peak at the future state OpenStack dominates open cloud adoption today, but CloudStack and Eucalyptus are in the hunt Flexibility (68%), Open Standards and APIs (62%) and No Vendor Lock-in (54%) were cited as topmost migration drivers for those who have already migrated to the open source cloud. Avoiding vendor lock-in also manifested itself as did the desire for Time-to-Market, Innovation and Access to an Ecosystem. Less than 7% of respondents are currently dissatisfied with their open cloud infrastructures indicative of their leading edge technical skills Early open cloud adopters value most: Efficiency & Performance of Virtualization Technology (75%), a project's use of Preferred Open Source Software Licensing (52%) and Quality of the Community Ecosystem (64%) Open cloud's future is bright 57% of respondents said they are thinking of deploying an open source cloud in the future, and 2/3 rd of those considering the open cloud aim to deploy 1-2 years. Of those considering deploying an open cloud, 63% are looking at OpenStack, 78% are looking at CloudStack and 24% are looking at Eucalyptus Additional resources on virtualization and the open source cloud An accompanying infographic to spur conversation amongst your IT team is here Zenoss Core 4 (free version) which monitors physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure via a single, unified IT operations platform is available here: Join the conversation at the Zenoss blog: 2

3 Methodology Zenoss provides content free to a community of IT professionals 100,000-strong, including documentation, blogs, forums and videos. Users within the Zenoss community were asked within the 3 rd quarter of 2012 to volunteer specifics about their current and future usage of virtualization and cloud computing technologies. This information helps Zenoss to prioritize features for the benefit of the Zenoss user community. Survey Sample The survey sample is derived from 628 members of the Zenoss Open Source community and was conducted by open participation and advertised to users in the Zenoss user community via blogs and an . About Zenoss, Inc. 35,000 of the world s largest IT infrastructures use Zenoss monitoring software to guarantee uninterrupted service. Leaders at these institutions enable revenue growth and cut costs by consolidating onto a single, unified IT operations platform from which to manage their hybrid networks of on-premise servers, storage and networking equipment, alongside virtual and cloud infrastructures. The IT teams gain 360 visibility as to the stability and capacity of their IT operations, and their business, academic and government counterparts assure delivery of mission-critical services. Customers include LinkedIn, Los Alamos National Labs, Rackspace, VMware, Huntington Bank and SunGard. 3

4 The State of the Open Source Cloud See below responses regarding enterprise usage of cloud computing, and Zenoss analysis regarding what this means for the industry, especially where responses have evolved since the previous survey in The Who, What & Where of Survey Respondents Respondents indicated the following regarding the entities they represent, their job roles therein, industries served and geographic location. Figure 1.1 Responses to How many employees does your company have? 4

5 While System Administrator was by far the most prevalent job role, followed by Systems Architect, 84 respondents selected Other for job role, indicating that organization structures are still very much being defined for cloud management. Examples written-in included values such as IT Manager, Database Manager, NOC Operator, Enterprise Architect and Information Security. Only one write-in title included the word Cloud. Figure Responses to What is your role in the organization? 5

6 Most respondents identified themselves as members of the technology industry almost 40%. Those providing network, compute & storage services commercially ( service providers ) and within academic communities ( education ) accounted for another quarter of respondents. Healthcare and Finance were less well-represented, but still account for the insights of over 70 IT professionals. Figure Responses to What industry are you in? 6

7 Insights from a wide scope of other industries are also represented. Figure 1.4 Other Industry values written-in can be represented by a tag cloud Respondents to the survey also represent an increasingly-global open source community. Figure 1.5 Responses to In what geographical region are you located? 7

8 2. Virtualization Technologies Currently in Use Even within the open source community (where this survey was fielded), VMware remains the dominant hypervisor, in use by 3 out of 4 respondents. Open source Linux KVM and Xen had strong showings, and Microsoft Hyper-V rounds out the top 4. More than a dozen additional write-ins make it clear that the open source community is utilizing multiple hypervisors. Less than 6% of respondents indicated no virtualization was currently in use. Figure Responses to Which virtualization technology(ies) are you currently using? (Select all that apply) 8

9 3. Just How Open is the Cloud Today? The use of open source clouds lags behind the hype, with early adopters representing 17% of respondents. But the majority see open clouds in the future and look to deploy open cloud technology in Figure Responses to Are you currently using an open source cloud? 9

10 For those not currently using an open source cloud, Maturity, Lack of Support and Security are named as the top three reasons. Maturity and support can be solved via commercial open source offerings, while security remains a hot topic. Existing vendor relationships (especially with top management), lack of internal knowledge and skepticism with the cloud model generally were also cited in the write-in responses. Figure 3.2 Responses to Why are you not currently using an open source cloud? (Select all that apply) 10

11 4. Early Adopters of Open Cloud What can be learned from those who have adopted open source cloud infrastructure already? First, we can see that OpenStack has a sizeable early lead with regard to usage by this cohort, but CloudStack and Eucalyptus are very much in the hunt. Figure Responses to What open source cloud are you using? 11

12 Flexibility, open standards and avoidance of vendor lock-in were cited most often as drivers for those who have already migrated to the open source cloud. Additional reasons these respondents provided included time-tomarket, innovation and access to an eco-system all of which could be seen as sub-sets of the vendor lock-in argument. What is of particular interest is that portability came in last in our survey; perhaps this will become a stronger driver within more mature hybrid cloud deployments. Figure 4.2 Responses to What drove you to make the decision to migrate to an open source cloud? (Select all that apply) 12

13 It bodes well that the vast majority of those who have deployed open source clouds identify themselves as neutral or satisfied to varying degrees with their open cloud infrastructure. Commercial open source providers will no doubt as they mature track down and resolve issues for the small minority of dissatisfied customers. Figure 4.3 Responses to From a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your open source cloud solution? 13

14 What have open source cloud users come to value most about their open clouds? One might expect them to value highest the community ecosystem or the licensing model that sets open source apart from proprietary models, but the clear winner is the virtualization technology itself, delivering the best overall efficiency and performance for the job at hand. Figure 4.4 Responses to What are the top 3 aspects of an Open Source Cloud solution that are most important to you? 14

15 5. Considering the Open Cloud The good news for open source cloud supporters is that the majority of those who aren t yet ready for an open cloud are considering this option and soon. Figure Responses to Are you thinking about deploying an open source cloud in the future? 15

16 1-2 years seems to be the sweet spot for deploying an open source cloud. This may be due to maturity concerns and/or waiting for early adopters to work out the challenges. Many of the write-in responses indicated timeframe would be to be determined based on a cost vs. benefit analysis. Figure 5.3 Responses to What is your timeframe for deploying an open source cloud? 16

17 What solutions will be considered in this timeframe? Once again, it is a 3-horse race between OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus. However, while most want to try OpenStack, they are also looking at its competitors. Figure 5.4 Responses to What open source cloud are you considering deploying within your timeframe? (Select all that apply) 17

18 Amongst those considering deploying an open cloud, flexibility and open standards are the topmost reasons. The majority of respondents picked savings as well indicating pressures on IT teams to reduce costs while increasing agility. Figure 5.5 Responses to What drove you to make the decision to migrate to an open source cloud? (Select all that apply) 18

19 6. Open Cloud Naysayers 90 respondents indicated having no interest in cloud generally. It is clear from respondents comments that cloud computing still has work to do with regards to winning over those who shun becoming wholly dependent on another entity. Security (and especially the security of health data & regulations around such) was a frequent concern. In several cases, the respondents own clients dictated that solutions could not be hosted in the cloud. Application mismatch limited the flexibility of some firms, while others hadn t yet become comfortable with the level of support available. These arguments certainly point to a lack of maturity within the broader cloud ecosystem. Many respondents see no need for an open cloud because their current proprietary cloud vendors are meeting their needs. Perhaps their legacy software vendor now offers hosted solutions, and sticking with this vendor minimizes disruption in processes. Others prefer to pick one vendor ( one neck to throttle ) and focus their energies on influence there. Figure 6.1 Responses to What are your reasons for not considering an open source cloud solution? (Select all that apply) 19

20 7. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) While Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is getting a lot of attention and gaining momentum, the overwhelming majority of respondents are not yet using PaaS today. Figure 7.1 Responses to Do you use a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)? 20

21 The dominance of Google as the majority PaaS in use today was unexpected. From our results, Google has a significant opportunity to dominate PaaS. Additional write-ins included Salesforce.com, Amazon and homegrown solutions. Figure 7.2 Responses to Which of the following are you using? 21

22 We asked those who aren t yet using PaaS to indicate whether this is under consideration, and almost 70% of said no. Discomfort with investing development resources on top of another entity s platform will likely lessen as the industry matures. Taking this larger step also directly impacts how applications are staffed for development, and then configured for delivery to end users. Figure 7.3 Responses to Are you considering using a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)? 22

23 For those who are considering the use of PaaS, Google took the top spot again as a potential solution. However, both Cloud Foundry and OpenShift appear within the short list. Write-in comments indicated most were still researching their options. Perhaps next year we will be conducting an Open PaaS and Open Cloud Survey. Figure 7.4 Responses to Which one of the following are you considering? 23