I get the narrative of the article, but I think it is counterproductive to use headlines like this. I have noticed this sentiment that the article author is pointing to ("the world only needs containers", etc) on Reddit and other forums. But the reality is that Openstack is a very capable IaaS platform that does not have a match in the open source space. If you are comfortable using commercial solutions, then yes, there are certainly ones that could compare to Openstack in one aspect or another. But if we are agreeing that open source is good (for the market) in the long term then it would be unwise to think that Openstack is done and over with.

My experience is that Openstack opens up the world of cloud infrastructure to organizations that are either very large and therefore have the inclination to own their services and workloads, or organizations that have specific security requirements.

Openstack is not going anywhere anytime soon.

That is good to hear (that it isn't dead).

But I don't really believe the numbers in question. Azure? Really? I really tried to connect to technical people that know their stuff around it because I thought about migrating from AWS. Not because I dislike it or particularly like Microsoft, it just would be a good fit for some selected companies that are already invested there. I don't know where there are hiding, but I just cannot find many devs in that area. I find many consultants and some are good, but sometimes I need someone that can sketch a way to implement some more arcane things.

Where is Azure really employed? Certain industries? Are these numbers inflated with O365 users? I used some quick and dirty power apps and power automate, am I an Azure user already?

Serverless is absolutely not in my interest. I did some IOT integrations and it can be of help here, especially since you already use the voice recognition of the same provider. But beyond that? Make myself dependent on infrastructure of this kind that will probably look entirely different in 1-2 years? Meh...

It's the same with mainframes, not everyone can and want to throw it's data onto a cloud that operates under the "cloud-act".

And there is not one cloud operator that has the security, reliability, bandwidth and uptime of a mainframe.

One example of a new deployment given in the article is Canonical's OpenStack product at MTS, a Russian telco. MTS is ultimately controlled by Russian oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov. Given current circumstances what are Canonical's plans regarding continuing sales and support to Russian companies?