The OpenStack community today released Ocata, the 15th version of its open source infrastructure software. And the OpenStack community wants everyone to know that private clouds are cost effective. The group is arguing that for many enterprises the choice to build an OpenStack private cloud is probably far cheaper than using public clouds.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, cites a testimonial from Snapdeal, a large e-commerce company in India. Snapdeal originally used a public cloud, but over time it built its own OpenStack private cloud, and company executives say they’ve seen a 75 percent savings in monthly infrastructure costs.

The leaders at the OpenStack Foundation have taken note of testimonials such as the one from Snapdeal. They also noted a recent cost-benefit analysis conducted by Nokia on the affordability of private clouds.

Bryce says there’s been a lot of growth in public cloud, but enterprises are starting to realize that often they’re paying a high price for public cloud services even when they’re not using them. And while Amazon Web Services (AWS) has done a stellar job of marketing itself, OpenStack has focused more on explaining its technology, rather than touting the business case for a private cloud.

“We haven’t done a great job of telling that story,” says Bryce. “On the flip side, AWS does a great job of telling that AWS is the only way to run infrastructure.”

But he says there’s a shift in the general tech consciousness about just how expensive public cloud is to run a workload over an extended period of time. “We’ve seen a number of users that did public cloud and say public cloud is the most expensive way to get a server,” says Bryce.

For example Snap, the parent company of the social media app Snapchat, recently issued a Form S-1 that disclosed the company paid almost as much to Google for public cloud services in a year as it generated in revenue, reported Recode.

Horror stories like this are causing some enterprises to repatriate workloads from public clouds to private clouds.

The OpenStack community has witnessed the growing multi-cloud trend, where enterprises are employing a more sophisticated workload allocation strategy across public and private clouds. “We’re by no means anti-public cloud,” says Bryce. “But private cloud is going to be in the mix. The hybrid cloud strategy is going to be the number one choice for most enterprises.”

As far as the Ocata release, Bryce says it makes OpenStack more accessible to the mainstream. He said in the past a lot of technical expertise was required to set up an OpenStack cloud compared to using a public cloud where a customer could get instant value.

Ocata is focused on stabilization, including scalability and performance of the core compute and networking services. The release also brings greater support for container-based application frameworks at the networking layer, as well as containerization of OpenStack services for easier deployment and upgrade management, treating OpenStack as a microservice application.

Container-based application frameworks and deployment tools saw the most contributor growth in the Ocata release cycle. Those projects were Kolla (containerized OpenStack services), Kuryr (bridging container networking and storage) and Zun (container management).

More than 50 project teams contributed to Ocata, comprising about 2,000 developers from 52 countries and 265 organizations.