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May 9, 2024

2024's Top Open Source Infrastructure Technologies

Javier Perez
Javier Perez

Web Infrastructure

Open source infrastructure technologies often play a business-critical role in an organization's software stack. In the State of Open Source Report, we asked our survey population, “What open source infrastructure technologies does your organization use today to support your software infrastructure?” 

We expanded the list of options this year and allowed respondents to select more than one, as it is typical for organizations to deploy multiple open source infrastructure technologies for one or many applications — for example, running Apache HTTP Server and then NGINX as a reverse proxy or load balancer in front of Apache Tomcat and Apache TomEE servers. 

Keep reading to find out which open source infrastructure technologies are the most popular and data trends by industry. 

Table of Contents

  1. NGINX Pulls Ahead of Apache as Most Used Open Source Infrastructure Technology
  2. Go Inside the State of Open Source Report
  3. Open Source Infrastructure Software by Industry
  4. Final Thoughts
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NGINX Pulls Ahead of Apache as Most Used Open Source Infrastructure Technology

For the first time since we started publishing this report, NGINX surpassed Apache HTTP as the most used open source infrastructure software — by just 1%. Tomcat captured the #3 spot and is used by a quarter (25.31%) of our respondents. 

Here's a chart showing the full breakdown:

Source: 2024 State of Open Source Report


As you can see, this category is dominated by Apache and Eclipse* projects; the only technologies not sponsored by either are NGINX, Keycloak, and newcomer OpenEuler.

Speaking of Keycloak — which is used for identity and access management — the report showed a bump in usage, from 3% last year to almost 11% this year. This is yet another indication that security is top of mind for organizations, and it’s encouraging that among government and public service organizations, usage is even higher, at 14%. 

OpenEuler is a new open source operating system based on the Linux kernel already gaining traction. It’s designed for cloud computing, data centers, embedded systems, and edge computing.

The top 5 Eclipse Foundation infrastructure technologies (and their respective usage percentages) according to the report:

  • Eclipse Jetty (10.9%)
  • Jakarta EE (10.56%)
  • Eclipse Temurin (9.47%)
  • Eclipse Mosquitto (7.8%)
  • Eclipse Paho (7.12%)

*Note: Eclipse Foundation was a collaborating partner for the 2024 State of Open Source Report 

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Go Inside the State of Open Source Report

In this on-demand webinar, experts from Perforce Software, Open Source Initiative, and Eclipse Foundation discuss the key takeaways from the 2024 report.

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Open Source Infrastructure Software by Industry

When we examined the results across a few industries, some interesting patterns emerged in terms of Apache vs. NGINX:

IndustryNGINXApache HTTP
Technology50.48%43.00%
Government and Public Services42.11%45.65%
Telecommunications40.48%40.48%

Technology organizations seem to favor NGINX, perhaps because of performance requirements. Government and public service agencies, on the other hand, appear to prefer Apache HTTP. And in the telecommunications sector, it’s a tie. 

Other notable insights by industry:

  • OpenEuler is being adopted by vehicle, transportation, and logistics companies, with 7.5% of respondents in that sector using it
  • Eclipse Glassfish is popular among energy, oil, and gas entities, with 14.29% of those respondents using it
  • 15% of respondents working in banking, insurance, or financial services use Jakarta EE
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Final Thoughts

The State of Open Source Report provides detailed information on the open source infrastructure technologies that are being used and adopted by organizations around the world. Respondents from different regions, industries, and company sizes selected their open source infrastructure software, which represents, in most cases, the bedrock of their business-critical applications. 

While there are tens of thousands of open source technologies that could be considered software infrastructure (not counting Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies which we put into a separate category of the report), these results show the importance of the Java stack. The popularity of open source projects such as Apache Tomcat, Apache TomEE, Apache ActiveMQ, Jakarta EE, Eclipse Jetty and others indicate the prevalence Java applications across industries.

More open source infrastructure technologies are being developed every day, and we look forward to seeing how this space evolves and the results in the upcoming year.

Read the Report — or Get Support!

Did you find this article interesting? Download the complete State of Open Source Report for insights on other open source technologies.

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