SUSE[1], formerly a Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation[2], may have left the open-source, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) OpenStack cloud[3], but the project is going to move forward with the forthcoming 20th release of OpenStack: Train.

That's because while SUSE may no longer find OpenStack[4] profitable, others are finding it works well for them and for their customers. "OpenStack is the market's leading choice of open-source infrastructure for containers, VMs and bare metal in private cloud," said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation in a statement.

"Looking forward to 2022, market watchers like 451 Research[5] see an emerging $7.7 billion market for OpenStack products and services and $4.3 billion for application containers," continued Collier. "As the overall open-source cloud market continues its march toward eight figures in revenue and beyond, it's clear that the OpenStack and application container markets are advancing hand in hand." 

That's not just Collier whistling in the dark. While some people believe that OpenStack is losing ground to Kubernetes[6] as a vital part of the cloud, the two actually work well together. A recent OpenStack user survey[7] found "Kubernetes remains the top framework among container and PaaS tools used to manage OpenStack applications. OpenStack and Kubernetes are increasingly deployed as complementary technologies, especially in multi-cloud scenarios." 

This makes sense. Kubernetes, more often than not, runs on virtual machines (VMs) and OpenStack is the most popular VM-oriented IaaS.

OpenStack users also value independence from public cloud vendor lock-in. 83% of its users turn to it because it frees them from relying too much on any single public cloud. Indeed, OpenStack users often rely on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) (44%), Microsoft Azure (28%) or Google

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