OpenStack deployments are getting bigger in terms of scale, according to new survey results from OpenStack. The survey results also show that the open source software is seeing strong growth globally.

These positive indicators for the open source group contrast with some news earlier in the week that appeared less positive. On Monday, Intel said it was pulling its funding for the OpenStack Innovation Center (OSIC), which it co-founded with Rackspace in 2015.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said OSIC was a joint commercial project between Intel and Rackspace, not an official OpenStack community project. “Intel did not pull out of OpenStack,” stressed Bryce. “They’re a headline sponsor at our Boston Summit.”

In fact, an Intel spokesman told SDxCentral on Monday that “Both companies believe strongly in the future of OpenStack and will continue to contribute to, and collaborate in, the community.”

There have also been some reports in other news outlets that OpenStack isn’t filling the needs of large enterprises. But Bryce scoffed at that.

“Telecoms and service providers are a significant piece of our user base now, but enterprises are still a bigger chunk of the OpenStack user base,” said Bryce. He named enterprise users of OpenStack that include Wells Fargo, Visa, American Express, Walmart, Target, Gap, eBay, PayPal, BMW, Volkswagon, and GE.

As far as service providers, AT&T is leading the charge with OpenStack as it builds its telco cloud. Other big carriers are now following AT&T’s lead, including China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Orange, and Swisscom.

For its ninth user survey, more than 1,300 users, spanning 78 countries took part. Sixty-one percent of those users and 74 percent of deployments are physically located outside of the United States.

“We’ve seen incredible growth in China,” said Bryce. “The number of deployments in China is massive: banks, state power grids, on and on.”

And in terms of scale, the typical size of an OpenStack cloud increased; 37 percent of clouds have 1,000 or more cores, compared to 29 percent a year ago. And three percent of clouds have more than 100,000 cores.

Walmart recently revealed it has 213,000 cores on OpenStack.

However, OpenStack’s measurement of user satisfaction, the Net Promoter Score (NPS), fell somewhat, though users with the newest clouds were the most satisfied users.

“Trends over time showed increased satisfaction until this survey, where the number of promoters fell off by three points year-over-year, while detractors increased by two points,” said the survey. However, the survey also looked at deployments by age of the cloud, finding that deployments created in 2016 and 2017 were most satisfied.

Containers remain the top emerging technology of interest to OpenStack users. Among those currently deploying container orchestration or platform services on the software, 47 percent are using Kubernetes.

There was a new question on the survey this year: Which vendor’s products power users’ OpenStack clouds? Red Hat, Canonical, and Mirantis topped the list.

The ninth OpenStack User Survey represents a snapshot of 583 deployments logged between January 26, 2017 and March 1, 2017. It compared results from a similar time frame in 2016.