What is OpenStack?
OpenStack is the leading open source cloud platform, designed to power mission-critical workloads of any type; where world’s largest telcos, governments, enterprises and financial institutions find a common ground to optimize their infrastructure costs and achieve digital sovereignty.
OpenStack in numbers
OpenStack is a cloud platform
OpenStack was launched in 2010 and its primary objective was to resemble the behavior of leading public clouds. This is why AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud workloads can be moved to OpenStack so easily. The platform, however, is fully open source, resulting in code transparency and no vendor lock-in.
Under the hood, OpenStack uses many other software components and open source projects, such as KVM, Ceph, and OVN. All of that, wrapped with programmable APIs and end-to-end automation, delivers a cloud experience that lets users provision and manage cloud resources through a self-service portal.
Today OpenStack serves as a de facto standard for building clouds of any type. Native integration with Kubernetes and world’s leading chipsets, such as NVIDIA GPUs, make it a perfect candidate for running both traditional and modern, cloud-native applications.
Why OpenStack?
OpenStack has been trusted globally by thousands of organizations across all market sectors. Beyond its open source nature, it has been widely adopted around the world thanks to three core pillars in recent years.
Stable and mature
OpenStack has been on the market for more than one and a half decades now – this means a lot in the software space. Today, OpenStack is more like Linux: it’s a mature project, demonstrating a high level of stability and security as typically required by the most demanding users and industries.
Well-known APIs
Things are easy to integrate if you can just plug them in. OpenStack APIs are well-known, documented, and widely supported, enabling smooth integration with the world’s leading backup & recovery platforms, cloud management platforms, and many other third-party software products.
Comprehensive and versatile
Being the default choice for cloud infrastructure implementation purposes, OpenStack has been pushed to its limits across many different use cases. Banking systems, government services, 5G core, and AI are just a few examples of cloud workloads running on OpenStack in production today.
Cloud computing on your terms
Build your own cloud infrastructure and augment your multi-cloud strategy with a feature-rich on-prem extension. Accept no compromises. OpenStack lets you move your business to the cloud on your own terms.
Cost optimization
Always run your applications where it makes most sense from an economical standpoint. OpenStack serves as a cost-effective extension to existing public cloud infrastructure, providing cost optimization capabilities and leading to a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) over time.
Digital sovereignty
Safeguard national interests, comply with local regulations, and regain full control of privacy. Due to the open source nature of the project and vendor-neutral governance, an OpenStack-based private cloud helps you achieve the desired level of digital sovereignty.
Performance acceleration
In regions of the world where hyperscalers don’t have their own data centers, high latency becomes a challenge. OpenStack enables governments, service providers, and individual organizations to build their own regional cloud infrastructure and thus meet performance requirements of cloud workloads.
OpenStack and Canonical
Canonical has been involved in OpenStack development since the inception of the project. We recognized its value early on and over years have invested in its growth heavily. Today, hundreds of organizations all over the world rely on us for OpenStack security and support.
2nd-biggest contributor ever
According to stackalytics.io Canonical is the 2nd biggest contributor to OpenStack ever in terms of the overall number of lines of code submitted. We are actively involved in the upstream community and keep pushing project boundaries towards cutting-edge technologies every day.
Ubuntu – community’s default choice
As a publisher and maintainer of Ubuntu, we also take care of packaging OpenStack. This work pays off – based on the latest results from the annual OpenStack User Survey, more than 50% of organizations run their OpenStack clusters on the Ubuntu operating system.
Gold member of the foundation
Collaboration with the upstream community is part of our DNA. Canonical is proudly a gold member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (now part of the Linux Foundation) and a member of its board. We represent our customers’ voices there, shaping the directions for future OpenStack development.
Maintainer of the Sunbeam project
In order to lower the barrier to entry to OpenStack and revolutionize its operational experience, we launched Project Sunbeam. Sunbeam delivers an opinionated, truly cloud-native OpenStack, with full bottom-up automation. It follows Ubuntu security commitments, as required by enterprise customers.
Get OpenStack
Want to run OpenStack but don’t know where to start? Simply install it yourself with our reference tools or let our experts build the cloud for you.
Taking the very first steps on the OpenStack adoption path has never been so easy. Get your first installation up and running in just a few simple steps and break the ice with the platform immediately.
Looking for professional services for OpenStack? Let our experts build the cloud for you. Get your production environment designed and delivered in line with Canonical’s best practices and the latest market trends.
Versatility and comprehensiveness of OpenStack without all its complexity? Sounds like a perfect fit. Outsource its day-to-day operations to Canonical and free your teams to focus on the value OpenStack brings to your organization.
- 1 Source: stackalytics.io. ↩
- 2 Source: mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/openstack-services-market. ↩