AUSTIN, Texas — October 19, 2020 — Open Infrastructure Summit — The OpenStack Foundation has taken the next step in its ongoing evolution “to build open source communities that write infrastructure software in production” by becoming the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF). The name change recognizes an expansion of the organization’s mission, scope and community to advance open source over the next decade to support open infrastructure for a market estimated at $20 billion USD[1].
As the requirements for compute, storage and networking have evolved, the role of open source software has expanded. During this evolution, the Foundation has remained focused on building open source communities that write software for production environments for emerging use cases, including artificial intelligence (AI), 5G and edge computing.
“Over the last 10 years since we started OpenStack, open source has experienced such rapid growth that today 99% of companies run open source components in their codebase[2],” said Mark Collier, COO of the OIF. “As we look to the next decade of infrastructure, it’s clear that open source is the way we’ll get there, and a community-driven software approach is how we will do it. That’s why we are excited to welcome Ant Group, FiberHome and Wind River as new Platinum Members, committed to community collaboration and driving progress with open infrastructure projects.”
A key participant in the community-driven software approach for Kata Containers, Ant Group, the world’s largest payment processor, joined the OIF as a Platinum Member during the October 13 Foundation board meeting. Its team contributes upstream to Kata Containers, has a member on the Architecture Committee and runs Kata Containers in production on thousands of nodes and over 10,000 cores. In the Open Infrastructure Summit keynotes tomorrow, Xu Wang, senior staff engineer at Ant Group, will demonstrate the latest Kata Containers features and explain why Ant Group believes the isolation provided by Kata Containers will be the cornerstone of its financial-grade infrastructure architecture.
“Today, we are very excited to celebrate the launch of the Open Infrastructure Foundation. As a main contributor and user of Kata Containers, one of the Open Infrastructure projects of the foundation, we have benefited much from the community collaboration under its Four-Open philosophy in the past years, which perfectly matches our mission to ‘bring about constant and incremental changes that are beneficial to the world,’” said Zhengyu He, senior director of Trust-Native Technology, Ant Group. “With the new foundation name, we believe that we could create more great Open Infra projects like OpenStack and Kata Containers.”
“Since Cloudical has many years of OpenStack experience, and since VanillaStack is the fastest and most easy way to roll out OpenStack on Kubernetes, the decision to join the new Open Infrastructure Foundation was inevitable and obvious to us”, explains Karsten Samaschke, CEO of Cloudical.
“As a cloud-native company, working with open source products for many years and being engaged in contributing to different open source projects, OpenStack is a big focus to us”, adds Kim-Norman Sahm, CTO of Cloudical. “We are convinced about the endless possibilities OpenStack is offering, and about the Open Infrastructure Foundation’s approaches and its future direction”, he points out.
Supporting Open Infrastructure Projects for the Next Decade
Currently the OIF comprises over 100,000 community members in over 187 countries and advances projects such as Airship, Kata Containers, OpenInfra Labs, OpenStack, StarlingX and Zuul. Today, the OIF announces its support for the Magma project.
Magma is an open source software platform that gives network operators an open, flexible and extendable mobile core network solution. Magma was developed by Facebook to bring more people online to a faster network by enabling service providers with open, flexible and extensible carrier-grade networks. Facebook provides technical direction and development leadership for the project, bringing Magma deployments to market globally in partnership with a growing ecosystem.
Magma, OpenInfra Labs Showcased During Summit Keynotes
During today’s keynote, OIF’s Jonathan Bryce, executive director, and Collier will be joined by Amar Padmanabhan, software engineer at Facebook, who will share how opening up infrastructure for connectivity has the potential to bring more people online around the world. They will be followed by Boris Renksi, founder of FreedomFi, who will walk the audience through the process of building up a wireless network using off-the-shelf components and open source software.
In tomorrow’s Open Infrastructure Summit keynotes, OpenInfra Labs will be announced as the newest pilot project of the OIF. OpenInfra Labs is making it easier for users to consume and operate clouds constructed from a rich set of open source projects. It is built on an initial use case of the Mass Open Cloud (a collaboration between Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, UMass, industry partners and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), a real-world platform delivering open source projects as services. The community has created a collaboration to develop tools and spaces to produce results, increase visibility of requirements within and across open source communities, and accelerate progress in closing the gaps to enable open source projects to be integrated into reproducible clouds that can be federated together.
“Open source is the foundation for all clouds today, but there are numerous gaps that someone standing up a fully open source production cloud needs to bridge,” said Orran Krieger, principal investigator, Mass Open Cloud & Boston University. “OpenInfra Labs is helping bridge the gap between operators and developers, enabling a community for operators to share their knowledge, providing open source developers real visibility into how their stuff is used, and creating a path for the open source community to take full advantage of the agility that public clouds and cloud users have achieved with DevOps. We imagine a day when a patch to your open source project goes through CI/CD, is tested with real users in an hour, and then is rolled out to hundreds of private and public clouds across the world in a day.”
OIF: The Home of Open Infrastructure
OpenStack software has flourished in the last decade, becoming one of the Top 3 most actively developed open source software projects in the world, along with the Linux kernel and Chromium. Along the way, the Foundation expanded its mission to establish new open source communities with a focus on building software that runs in production across the world and addressing numerous emerging use cases, including AI/ML; CI/CD; container infrastructure; edge computing; and public, private and hybrid Clouds. The OIF also nurtures cross-community collaboration with other open source communities like Ansible, Ceph, Gerrit, Kubernetes, rust-vmm and more. This evolution transformed the OSF into OIF, the home of open infrastructure.
OIF’s Vision for Open Infrastructure: Access to All
In their keynote presentation at the virtual Open Infrastructure Summit today, Bryce and Collier shared a vision for open infrastructure, describing a world where access to infrastructure is available to all.
Bryce described four factors impacting the OIF’s prioritization of resources and community participation:
- More open source components to build, integrate and test.
- Hardware diversification in compute, storage and networking architectures, including GPUs, FPGAs and ARM servers to meet performance, economic, latency and power requirements.
- Deployment models in data centers, edge computing and IoT, ranging from small to hyperscale environments.
- Global government regulations, including data sovereignty and privacy.
About the Open Infrastructure Foundation
The Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF) builds communities that write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 100,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OIF hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds.
[1]Sources: 451 Research: “Open Source Cloud Platforms Market Monitor: OpenStack,”
(September 2019), and Gartner press release (July 28, 2020)
[2]Source: Synopsys: 2020 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report