Ubuntu, Puppet, Grizzly Play Key Roles in OpenStack Deployments

by Sean Michael Kerner

Tim Bell, Operating System and Infrastructure Service team lead at CERN, is one of the leaders of the OpenStack User Committee and is helping to foster a feedback loop from users to developers.

From a deployment perspective, the U.S. has more OpenStack deployments than any other country.

Across all survey respondents, avoiding vendor lock-in was identified as the leading business driver, with cost savings and operational efficiency also being very important.

For those who are using OpenStack in production, more are using the Grizzly release, which debuted in April of 2013, than any other OpenStack release.

For OpenStack clouds in production, most deployments are using the core Nova Compute, Glance Image and Keystone Identity services.

There are a lot of different technologies that can be used to deploy an OpenStack cloud. For OpenStack users running in production, the top choice by a long shot is Puppet.

There are a number of different virtualization hypervisors that OpenStack production clouds are running, including VMware’s ESX and the open-source Xen and KVM hypervisors.

OpenStack needs to sit on top of an operating system to function. For most of the OpenStack clouds in production deployment, that operating system is Ubuntu Linux.