OpenStack Contract Job Trends

OpenStack
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring OpenStack skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 26 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 532 505 505
Rank change year-on-year -27 0 +199
Contract jobs citing OpenStack 56 32 102
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.15% 0.10% 0.23%
As % of the Application Platforms category 1.49% 0.91% 2.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 34 24 66
10th Percentile £406 £474 £262
25th Percentile £435 £509 £300
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £615 £425
Median % change year-on-year -10.57% +44.71% -15.00%
75th Percentile £588 £675 £526
90th Percentile £670 £775 £594
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £550 £400
% change year-on-year - +37.50% -17.53%

All Application Platform Skills
UK

OpenStack falls under the Application Platforms category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring application platform skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for application platform skills 3,754 3,517 4,334
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.95% 11.24% 9.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,600 2,164 2,913
10th Percentile £298 £250 £250
25th Percentile £400 £381 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £588 £623 £600
90th Percentile £693 £725 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £450 £450
% change year-on-year +5.56% - -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 95 73 156
10th Percentile £14.49 £17.08 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.50 £22.00 £16.98
Median hourly rate £25.15 £41.00 £28.25
Median % change year-on-year -38.66% +45.13% +46.75%
75th Percentile £69.25 £63.75 £55.63
90th Percentile £82.60 £66.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.50 £54.00 £25.64
% change year-on-year -58.33% +110.61% +44.70%

OpenStack
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing OpenStack relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

OpenStack job vacancy trend in the UK

OpenStack
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing OpenStack.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing OpenStack

OpenStack
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing OpenStack over the 6 months to 26 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for OpenStack in the UK

OpenStack
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing OpenStack.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing OpenStack

OpenStack
Top 11 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing OpenStack within the UK over the 6 months to 26 January 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England -45 53 £560 -8.94% 32
UK excluding London -20 41 £550 - 33
Work from Home -10 16 £447 -27.32% 43
South East -22 14 - - 11
West Midlands -27 12 £575 +219.44% 3
Midlands -34 12 £575 +219.44% 3
North of England - 10 £563 - 7
North West - 9 £563 - 5
London -19 8 £554 -14.85% 3
East of England - 5 £413 - 6
Yorkshire - 1 - - 1

OpenStack
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 3 (5.36%) Confluence
2 1 (1.79%) Tomcat
Applications
1 6 (10.71%) Weka
Business Applications
1 1 (1.79%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 37 (66.07%) AWS
2 25 (44.64%) Azure
3 18 (32.14%) OpenShift
4 15 (26.79%) GCP
5 12 (21.43%) GitHub
5 12 (21.43%) GitHub Actions
6 6 (10.71%) AWS CloudFormation
7 5 (8.93%) Amazon EKS
7 5 (8.93%) Azure AKS
7 5 (8.93%) Azure DevOps
7 5 (8.93%) Cloud Computing
7 5 (8.93%) Datadog
7 5 (8.93%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 5 (8.93%) npm
7 5 (8.93%) Pulumi
8 1 (1.79%) Amazon EC2
8 1 (1.79%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 18 (32.14%) BGP
1 18 (32.14%) MPLS
2 14 (25.00%) LAN
2 14 (25.00%) WAN
3 10 (17.86%) OSPF
4 9 (16.07%) Firewall
5 8 (14.29%) TCP/IP
6 6 (10.71%) SNMP
6 6 (10.71%) TACACS
6 6 (10.71%) VLAN
6 6 (10.71%) Wireless
7 4 (7.14%) 3GPP
7 4 (7.14%) 4G
7 4 (7.14%) 5G
7 4 (7.14%) DHCP
7 4 (7.14%) DNS
7 4 (7.14%) IPsec
7 4 (7.14%) Radio Access Network
7 4 (7.14%) Wireshark
8 2 (3.57%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (5.36%) Elasticsearch
2 1 (1.79%) Redis
Development Applications
1 18 (32.14%) GitLab
2 13 (23.21%) Jenkins
3 9 (16.07%) Git
4 8 (14.29%) SonarQube
5 7 (12.50%) CircleCI
6 6 (10.71%) JIRA
7 5 (8.93%) Artifactory
7 5 (8.93%) Bitbucket
7 5 (8.93%) Cypress.io
7 5 (8.93%) Gradle
7 5 (8.93%) JUnit
7 5 (8.93%) Maven
7 5 (8.93%) Postman
7 5 (8.93%) Selenium
7 5 (8.93%) Snyk
7 5 (8.93%) Sonatype Nexus
7 5 (8.93%) webpack
8 1 (1.79%) Atlassian Bamboo
General
1 20 (35.71%) Social Skills
2 9 (16.07%) Documentation Skills
3 6 (10.71%) Telecoms
4 5 (8.93%) Analytical Skills
5 2 (3.57%) Public Sector
6 1 (1.79%) Banking
6 1 (1.79%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 20 (35.71%) Architect
2 7 (12.50%) DevOps Engineer
2 7 (12.50%) IP Architect
2 7 (12.50%) IP Specialist
3 6 (10.71%) Designer
3 6 (10.71%) IP Designer
3 6 (10.71%) Solutions Architect
4 5 (8.93%) Platform Engineer
5 3 (5.36%) Automation Architect
5 3 (5.36%) Consultant
5 3 (5.36%) Security Specialist
5 3 (5.36%) Senior
5 3 (5.36%) Virtualisation Engineer
6 2 (3.57%) Cybersecurity Specialist
6 2 (3.57%) Domain Architect
6 2 (3.57%) Engineering Specialist
6 2 (3.57%) Kubernetes Architect
6 2 (3.57%) Principal Architect
6 2 (3.57%) Senior Architect
7 1 (1.79%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (23.21%) REST
2 11 (19.64%) Elastic Stack
3 9 (16.07%) YAML
4 8 (14.29%) NETCONF
4 8 (14.29%) YANG
5 5 (8.93%) JSON
5 5 (8.93%) RESTful
6 4 (7.14%) RabbitMQ
7 3 (5.36%) Kafka
8 2 (3.57%) OpenAPI
8 2 (3.57%) React Native
8 2 (3.57%) Swagger
9 1 (1.79%) Hibernate
9 1 (1.79%) JPA
9 1 (1.79%) Loki
9 1 (1.79%) Node.js
9 1 (1.79%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 17 (30.36%) Private Cloud
2 15 (26.79%) Hybrid Cloud
3 11 (19.64%) Cloud Native
4 9 (16.07%) Data Centre
5 6 (10.71%) Grid Computing
5 6 (10.71%) Public Cloud
6 4 (7.14%) Operational Technology
7 3 (5.36%) Onboarding
7 3 (5.36%) Product Ownership
8 2 (3.57%) Security Posture
9 1 (1.79%) Distributed Systems
9 1 (1.79%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 22 (39.29%) Linux
2 4 (7.14%) VMS
2 4 (7.14%) Windows
3 2 (3.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (1.79%) CentOS
4 1 (1.79%) Ubuntu
4 1 (1.79%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 36 (64.29%) DevOps
2 24 (42.86%) CI/CD
3 16 (28.57%) Containerisation
4 15 (26.79%) Agile
4 15 (26.79%) Infrastructure as Code
5 14 (25.00%) Incident Response
5 14 (25.00%) Network Virtualisation
6 13 (23.21%) Microservices
7 12 (21.43%) Configuration Management
8 11 (19.64%) Infrastructure Automation
9 10 (17.86%) Enterprise Architecture
10 9 (16.07%) SDLC
10 9 (16.07%) Software Delivery
11 8 (14.29%) Network Architecture
11 8 (14.29%) Network Design
11 8 (14.29%) Network Segmentation
11 8 (14.29%) Roadmaps
11 8 (14.29%) Strategic Thinking
11 8 (14.29%) TOGAF
12 7 (12.50%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 35 (62.50%) Python
2 18 (32.14%) Bash
3 5 (8.93%) Go
3 5 (8.93%) Java
4 4 (7.14%) PowerShell
5 3 (5.36%) JavaScript
6 2 (3.57%) SQL
7 1 (1.79%) C++
7 1 (1.79%) Perl
7 1 (1.79%) PL/SQL
7 1 (1.79%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 14 (25.00%) CCIE
1 14 (25.00%) Cisco Certification
1 14 (25.00%) JNCIE
2 9 (16.07%) Security Cleared
3 6 (10.71%) AWS Certification
3 6 (10.71%) DV Cleared
4 3 (5.36%) Degree
5 1 (1.79%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (1.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.79%) Master's Degree
5 1 (1.79%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (8.93%) QA
System Software
1 23 (41.07%) Docker
2 12 (21.43%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (14.29%) VMware NSX
4 6 (10.71%) GPFS
4 6 (10.71%) Lustre
4 6 (10.71%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 6 (10.71%) vSphere
5 4 (7.14%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (3.57%) Ceph
6 2 (3.57%) KVM
7 1 (1.79%) Active Directory
7 1 (1.79%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 33 (58.93%) Ansible
2 32 (57.14%) Kubernetes
3 28 (50.00%) Terraform
4 10 (17.86%) Grafana
5 7 (12.50%) Prometheus
5 7 (12.50%) Puppet
6 5 (8.93%) Podman
6 5 (8.93%) Progress Chef
7 4 (7.14%) Argo
8 3 (5.36%) Kibana
8 3 (5.36%) logstash
9 2 (3.57%) Istio
9 2 (3.57%) Rancher
9 2 (3.57%) Salt
10 1 (1.79%) Consul
Vendors
1 13 (23.21%) VMware
2 10 (17.86%) F5
3 8 (14.29%) Cisco
4 7 (12.50%) Splunk
5 6 (10.71%) Fortinet
5 6 (10.71%) Juniper
6 4 (7.14%) Dell
6 4 (7.14%) Palo Alto
7 3 (5.36%) Red Hat
7 3 (5.36%) Salesforce
7 3 (5.36%) Veracode
8 2 (3.57%) Arista
8 2 (3.57%) Wind River
9 1 (1.79%) AppDynamics
9 1 (1.79%) Dynatrace
9 1 (1.79%) Oracle