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 23 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 558 500 495
Rank change year-on-year -58 -5 +220
Contract jobs citing OpenStack 50 32 98
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.12% 0.10% 0.22%
As % of the Application Platforms category 1.26% 0.91% 2.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 35 24 62
10th Percentile £406 £500 £262
25th Percentile £439 £522 £300
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £615 £450
Median % change year-on-year -10.57% +36.67% -21.05%
75th Percentile £588 £675 £550
90th Percentile £670 £775 £600
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £550 £400
% change year-on-year -4.55% +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 3,956 3,517 4,272
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.73% 11.52% 9.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,732 2,180 2,862
10th Percentile £304 £255 £250
25th Percentile £400 £380 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £493
Median % change year-on-year - +1.52% -5.65%
75th Percentile £588 £613 £600
90th Percentile £688 £713 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £450 £450
% change year-on-year +5.56% - -5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 69 165
10th Percentile £15.00 £17.00 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.50 £22.50 £15.50
Median hourly rate £26.31 £41.91 £26.78
Median % change year-on-year -37.22% +56.50% +20.85%
75th Percentile £69.44 £64.50 £46.18
90th Percentile £81.70 £66.00 £68.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.21 £48.82 £24.00
% change year-on-year -44.26% +103.40% +17.07%

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 23 February 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 23 February 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 -61 44 £550 -11.29% 5
UK excluding London -40 34 £525 -4.55% 3
Work from Home -9 16 £449 -29.09% 3
Midlands - 13 £550 - 1
West Midlands - 13 £550 - 1
North of England - 10 £563 -
North West - 9 £563 -
South East -24 6 - - 2
London -49 6 £554 -14.85% 2
East of England - 5 £413 -
Yorkshire - 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 (6.00%) Confluence
Applications
1 6 (12.00%) Weka
Cloud Services
1 29 (58.00%) AWS
2 23 (46.00%) Azure
3 14 (28.00%) GCP
4 13 (26.00%) GitHub
5 12 (24.00%) OpenShift
6 10 (20.00%) GitHub Actions
7 5 (10.00%) Cloud Computing
8 4 (8.00%) Amazon EKS
8 4 (8.00%) AWS CloudFormation
8 4 (8.00%) Azure AKS
8 4 (8.00%) Azure DevOps
8 4 (8.00%) Datadog
8 4 (8.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
8 4 (8.00%) npm
8 4 (8.00%) Pulumi
Communications & Networking
1 10 (20.00%) BGP
1 10 (20.00%) MPLS
2 8 (16.00%) Firewall
3 7 (14.00%) TCP/IP
4 6 (12.00%) LAN
4 6 (12.00%) OSPF
4 6 (12.00%) VLAN
4 6 (12.00%) WAN
5 4 (8.00%) 3GPP
5 4 (8.00%) 4G
5 4 (8.00%) 5G
5 4 (8.00%) DHCP
5 4 (8.00%) DNS
5 4 (8.00%) IPsec
5 4 (8.00%) Radio Access Network
5 4 (8.00%) Wireshark
6 2 (4.00%) Calico
6 2 (4.00%) SNMP
6 2 (4.00%) VSAN
6 2 (4.00%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (12.00%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 18 (36.00%) GitLab
2 12 (24.00%) Jenkins
3 8 (16.00%) Git
4 7 (14.00%) SonarQube
5 6 (12.00%) CircleCI
5 6 (12.00%) JIRA
6 4 (8.00%) Artifactory
6 4 (8.00%) Bitbucket
6 4 (8.00%) Cypress.io
6 4 (8.00%) Gradle
6 4 (8.00%) JUnit
6 4 (8.00%) Maven
6 4 (8.00%) Postman
6 4 (8.00%) Selenium
6 4 (8.00%) Snyk
6 4 (8.00%) Sonatype Nexus
6 4 (8.00%) webpack
7 1 (2.00%) Gerrit
General
1 12 (24.00%) Social Skills
2 4 (8.00%) Telecoms
3 3 (6.00%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (6.00%) Documentation Skills
3 3 (6.00%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 15 (30.00%) Architect
2 7 (14.00%) Solutions Architect
3 6 (12.00%) DevOps Engineer
4 4 (8.00%) Developer
4 4 (8.00%) Platform Engineer
4 4 (8.00%) Security Specialist
5 3 (6.00%) Automation Architect
5 3 (6.00%) Cybersecurity Specialist
5 3 (6.00%) IP Architect
5 3 (6.00%) IP Specialist
5 3 (6.00%) SIEM Engineer
5 3 (6.00%) Virtualisation Engineer
6 2 (4.00%) Applications Engineer
6 2 (4.00%) Consultant
6 2 (4.00%) Designer
6 2 (4.00%) Elasticsearch Engineer
6 2 (4.00%) Engineering Specialist
6 2 (4.00%) IP Designer
6 2 (4.00%) Kubernetes Architect
6 2 (4.00%) Principal Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (26.00%) Elastic Stack
2 8 (16.00%) REST
2 8 (16.00%) YAML
3 4 (8.00%) JSON
3 4 (8.00%) NETCONF
3 4 (8.00%) RESTful
3 4 (8.00%) YANG
4 3 (6.00%) Kafka
4 3 (6.00%) RabbitMQ
5 2 (4.00%) OpenAPI
5 2 (4.00%) React Native
5 2 (4.00%) Swagger
6 1 (2.00%) Hibernate
6 1 (2.00%) JPA
6 1 (2.00%) Loki
6 1 (2.00%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 17 (34.00%) Private Cloud
2 9 (18.00%) Cloud Native
3 7 (14.00%) Hybrid Cloud
3 7 (14.00%) Public Cloud
4 6 (12.00%) Data Centre
4 6 (12.00%) Grid Computing
5 4 (8.00%) Operational Technology
6 3 (6.00%) Product Ownership
7 2 (4.00%) Onboarding
7 2 (4.00%) Security Posture
8 1 (2.00%) Distributed Systems
8 1 (2.00%) Driving Licence
8 1 (2.00%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 19 (38.00%) Linux
2 4 (8.00%) VMS
2 4 (8.00%) Windows
3 2 (4.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (2.00%) CentOS
4 1 (2.00%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 35 (70.00%) DevOps
2 24 (48.00%) CI/CD
3 15 (30.00%) Containerisation
4 13 (26.00%) Incident Response
4 13 (26.00%) Infrastructure as Code
5 12 (24.00%) Agile
6 10 (20.00%) Configuration Management
6 10 (20.00%) Infrastructure Automation
7 9 (18.00%) SIEM
8 8 (16.00%) Software Delivery
9 7 (14.00%) Observability
9 7 (14.00%) Performance Tuning
10 6 (12.00%) Cybersecurity
10 6 (12.00%) Microservices
10 6 (12.00%) Network Virtualisation
10 6 (12.00%) SDLC
10 6 (12.00%) Security Operations
10 6 (12.00%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 6 (12.00%) Software Engineering
10 6 (12.00%) Threat Detection
Programming Languages
1 27 (54.00%) Python
2 15 (30.00%) Bash
3 5 (10.00%) Java
4 4 (8.00%) Go
5 3 (6.00%) JavaScript
5 3 (6.00%) PowerShell
6 2 (4.00%) C++
7 1 (2.00%) Perl
7 1 (2.00%) Ruby
7 1 (2.00%) SQL
Qualifications
1 8 (16.00%) Security Cleared
2 6 (12.00%) CCIE
2 6 (12.00%) Cisco Certification
2 6 (12.00%) JNCIE
3 4 (8.00%) DV Cleared
4 3 (6.00%) Degree
5 2 (4.00%) AWS Certification
5 2 (4.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (4.00%) Master's Degree
6 1 (2.00%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (2.00%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (10.00%) QA
System Software
1 21 (42.00%) Docker
2 8 (16.00%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (12.00%) GPFS
3 6 (12.00%) Lustre
3 6 (12.00%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 6 (12.00%) vSphere
4 4 (8.00%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (8.00%) VMware NSX
5 3 (6.00%) Ceph
6 2 (4.00%) KVM
7 1 (2.00%) Active Directory
7 1 (2.00%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 33 (66.00%) Kubernetes
2 26 (52.00%) Ansible
3 25 (50.00%) Terraform
4 9 (18.00%) Grafana
5 6 (12.00%) Prometheus
5 6 (12.00%) Puppet
6 5 (10.00%) Kibana
6 5 (10.00%) logstash
7 4 (8.00%) Argo
7 4 (8.00%) Podman
7 4 (8.00%) Progress Chef
8 2 (4.00%) Istio
8 2 (4.00%) Rancher
8 2 (4.00%) Salt
9 1 (2.00%) Consul
Vendors
1 8 (16.00%) VMware
2 6 (12.00%) F5
3 4 (8.00%) Cisco
3 4 (8.00%) Dell
3 4 (8.00%) Palo Alto
3 4 (8.00%) Splunk
4 3 (6.00%) Red Hat
4 3 (6.00%) Salesforce
4 3 (6.00%) Veracode
5 2 (4.00%) Arista
5 2 (4.00%) Fortinet
5 2 (4.00%) Juniper
5 2 (4.00%) Wind River
6 1 (2.00%) Google
6 1 (2.00%) SAP