In the latest OpenStack user survey, we see that OpenStack is finally gaining real momentum in private clouds. We also see that Ubuntu Linux is continuing to dominate OpenStack.

Canonical

As Canonical cloud marketing manager Bill Bauman said, "Ubuntu OpenStack continues to dominate the majority of deployments with 55 percent of production OpenStack clouds."

The previous survey showed Ubuntu OpenStack at 33 percent of production clouds. Ubuntu has seen almost 67 percent growth in an area where Ubuntu was already the market leader. These numbers are a huge testament to the community support Ubuntu OpenStack receives every day."

Red Hat, with its own OpenStack distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OpenStack, is making a fight of it, though. RHEL, while only in third place, doubled its popularity from 8 to 16 percent. CentOS, the free RHEL clone, is the second most popular OpenStack Linux distribution with 20 percent.

One reason Ubuntu is increasing its lead is that Juju, Canonical's application modeling and deployment DevOps tool, has been gaining in popularity. Since the last OpenStack survey, Juju has increased its market share as a cloud deployment/management tool by 50 percent.

Ubuntu isn't just popular with the OpenStack crew. The Cloud Market's latest analysis of operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) shows Ubuntu with just over 215,000 instances.

Ubuntu is followed by Amazon's own Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 86,000 instances. Further back, you'll find Windows with 26,000 instances. In fourth and fifth place, respectively, you'll find Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with 16,500 instances and then CentOS with 12,500 instances.

Even Microsoft with its Azure cloud is getting into the act. While "only" one in four Azure operating instances are Linux, said Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, Microsoft chose to deploy its first major Linux server application, HDInsight, Microsoft's big data Hadoop-on-Azure service, on Ubuntu Linux on its Azure cloud.

The lesson is clear. If you want to work with servers on the cloud, you need to learn Ubuntu. It's become the Linux for the cloud generation.

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