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There are 306 universities running Islandora according to the latest survey. These numbers do not include government or private instances. Islandora 7 is a monolithic application that glues Drupal 6/7 to Fedora 3 with an optional institutional repository (IR) addon. Islandora 7 had several pain points, such as workflows, most of which required substantial coding to work around these issues. Although Islandora is a collection of several Drupal 6/7 modules, it wasn’t written in a way that leveraged much of Drupal’s content management functionality. Fortunately for 8 this has been remedied.
The Drupal 8 release in 2015 had a major overhaul of the code base. This meant that upgrading from Drupal 7 into Drupal 8 broke content libraries, functions, and theming. Drupal 8’s migration is an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process as part of its Migrate API. The data can come from a variety of places; a database, CSV, JSON, or REST function, and then transformed, imported, and processed (Migrate API overview, 2019).
Future upgrades of Drupal versions will look substantially different than before. Gone are the days of major migration planning as Drupal has completely overhauled their application lifecycle. With Drupal 9 being released in June 2020 the process of upgrading won’t cause any loss in functionality or any libraries to break; the core is completely backwards compatible. This important feature was adopted for the new life cycle for all future version releases. It was explained simply by Alex Lopez, “You’ll just get notices advising you to upgrade libraries, function calls, and anything else in your code that would make your module incompatible with a Drupal 10 version. But, theoretically, nothing that would break your module/site.”(2018). A large focus of Drupal core and module development for the 8 release was on specific industries, including but not limited to big data and higher education. “Build a wide range of solutions from university websites, applications, scholarly publishing, and more.” (Drupal for education, 2020). 
Islandora changed the development approach to align with Drupal 8’s direction. A major focus on Islandora 8 is to build the stack in a way that fully utilizes Drupal 8 and make the contributed modules available. There are so many modules currently developed and actively managed by other institutions that provide content modeling and developing metadata has become exceedingly easier. As the need for IRs increases, the number of options available have increased as well making it sometimes difficult to sift through to find the best option for the community. Since these are so new, many of these lack sufficient documentation or guidance on how to best utilize the modules for a digital or institutional repository. The Islandora community makes every effort to bring content models together by research, community vetting, writing documentation, and creating solutions to help provide a ready made (turn key) solution.Islandora 8 content is now utilizing Drupal nodes as the primary representation instead of how Islandora 7 overwrote Drupal routing to provide an object and it’s content. Islandora 8 content is Drupal content (stored in Fedora 5) and is completely compatible with 3rd party addons.