OpenStack has come a long way since NASA and Rackspace first launched it in 2010. Even with recent successes, technology professionals and those who use OpenStack still have a few questions and concerns surrounding the system.

Talligent, a provider of cost- and capacity-management solutions for OpenStack and hybrid clouds, announced its 2016 State of OpenStack Report yesterday. In the report, it identified some concerns of OpenStack, its use cases, barriers, and what’s currently driving OpenStack.

The report was commissioned by Talligent through CloudCow and VMblog, and it surveyed 647 virtualization and cloud IT professionals and executives across the globe.

(Related: Oracle offers a second release of OpenStack)

The survey found respondents in varying states of familiarity with OpenStack. Thirty percent said they currently use it to support projects or production workloads. Thirty-six percent said they are familiar with OpenStack, but have not yet implemented it.

Once OpenStack is in place, respondents said they expect to quickly expand beyond development environments, with lab growth moving from 43% to 89% and QA/Test to grow from 47% to 91%, both within the next 12 months, according to the report.

John Meadows, vice president of business development at Talligent, said that businesses should have confidence in the path that OpenStack is taking. He said that at Talligent, they were surprised to see the expectations that OpenStack will support such a wide range of workloads across various IT environments, and that the data shows support for the direction of the OpenStack community.

“Companies considering adopting OpenStack should understand that there are still challenges with regards to complexity and deployment,” said Meadows. “A successful OpenStack deployment will include some mix of technical expertise, operational tools, and the support of a solid OpenStack partner.”

Additionally, the shift to an on-demand cloud for IT service delivery requires a new approach to tracking, managing and comparing IT resources, said Meadows. Management tools should be designed to support automation, and deliver real-time insight for OpenStack adoption.

Other key findings from the OpenStack survey include:

  • Sixty-one percent of respondents are adopting OpenStack to combat the expense of public cloud alternatives
  • Challenges of OpenStack adoption include its security model (26% of respondents) and lack of operational tools (23%)
  • Private clouds will not be replaced by public clouds; 54% of respondents still expected their cloud use to be all or mostly private within the next five years
  • Fourteen percent of respondents expected a balance of private and public cloud over that same time period

The full report is available here.