What’s Next for Open Infrastructure and the OpenStack Foundation

2020 has already shown us that the future can be unpredictable. We’re just three short months into the year, and already our global community has experienced the unexpected in myriad ways. In the open infrastructure community—and the OpenStack Foundation (OSF) specifically—we certainly don’t have a “crystal ball” for what 2020 has in store, but we are confident that the future holds progress, because we have a shared vision and three critical assets:

an operational model for building open source software and communities that truly works;
strong open source software projects that are making steady progress; and
a global community that continues to make great strides in engagement and collaboration.

The Vision

The open infrastructure community remains committed to the OSF mission of helping people build and operate open infrastructure. Our vision, articulated in “big picture” terms, is our community’s four-way method:

identify use cases
collaborate across communities
build the required new technology
test everything end-to-end

You can read more about this in theOSF 2019 Annual Report, which highlights our recent achievements across the community and expresses some of our goals for the year ahead.

A Model that Works

A couple of years ago, our community recognized that we had something special at OSF: a successful approach to helping software communities thrive and grow, an approach that was worth replicating. At the same time, we recognized that the best way to support open infrastructure was to expand our contributions to a broader ecosystem of open source projects.

We developed a formal model for project supportthat includes (1) accepting pilot projects to nurture and (2) confirming for long-term support those projects that demonstrate progress and our community’s core values (Four Opens). Using this model, we have confirmed three new open infrastructure projects to complement OpenStack in powering the world’s open infrastructure: Kata Containers , Airship and Zuul . Those are in addition to active growth in the StarlingX community. In 2020, our goal is to create more documentation around this model.

Progress with Open Infrastructure Software Projects

In 2019, the OSF community had a productive year, merging 58,000 code changes to produce open source infrastructure software like Airship, Kata Containers, StarlingX, and Zuul, along with the third most active open source project in the world, OpenStack.

Here’s a quick run-down of what each of these projects aspire to accomplish in 2020:

Airship: The Airship community plans a complete rebuild of Airship core code with a beta version planned for June and a full 2.0 release later in 2020. In addition, Airship 2.0 will penetrate into more industry domains such as Common NFVi Telco (CNTT) and 5G testbeds. Other goals include:
- Supporting smaller deployments
- Making all workflows fully declarative
- Adopting upstream entrenched projects
- Enabling simpler document creation and management (Airship YAML was hard)
- Providing an improved flow for executing updates (changing the tires while the car is moving is hard)/li>
- Penetrating into the NFVi domain, enabling the reference implementation of Common Telco NFVi (CNTT) and supporting its VNF certification.
- Capitalizing on hardware donations by Ericsson and Dell for an Airship community lab to leverage as 3rd-party CI
- Empowering the 5G testbed by Ericsson

Kata Containers:Looking ahead to 2020, the Kata community will focus on supporting its growing user community, driving innovation with the Kata 2.0 roadmap, and continuing open collaboration with the rapidly expanding container ecosystem.
OpenStack:As usual, the OpenStack technical committee members will continue their work to expose special interest groups (SIGs) broadly, to ensure all the different profiles and interests in OpenStack are efficiently represented, working and collaborating together.
StarlingX: Edge computing use cases are emerging among organizations running StarlingX in production. At the Shanghai Summit in November 2019, China UnionPay presented how its contactless payment system leverages StarlingX. In 2020, the community is focusing on project upgrades and functional testing as the contributors work towards the 4.0 release.
Zuul: Zuul maintainers have begun collaborating with the Gerrit project to add Gerrit Checks API support to Zuul. The goal is to have a Zuul running to help gate the Gerrit project once this feature is added. Looking ahead, the Gerrit Checks API is only one of many features they would like to add to Zuul. From an integration standpoint Gitlab and Bitbucket support is under active development, changes have begun to merge Google Compute Engine support to Nodepool, and Microsoft Azure driver work has begun. Developers still have plans to remove the current single point of failure for the scheduler process and manage job and queue state with the distributed database. This will make it easier to run Zuul reliably without downtime.

In 2020, we are continuing to highlight emerging technologies and ask our community to proactively address the demands of intelligent open infrastructure. For example, workloads like AI and ML require support for new chip architectures, automation at scale down to the bare metal, and integration with many other open source components, all while stretching “cloud” to the edge for 5G and IoT. That’s why “Intelligent Open Infrastructure” will be the theme of our first virtual events of 2020—OpenDev + PTG—where we will focus on the integration of open source components to create an infrastructure that is monitoring itself, replicating itself, and delivering a versatile set of use cases.

A Productive, Engaged Community

With over 100,000 members and millions more visiting OSF websites in 2019 to get involved, the community made huge strides in addressing the needs of what 451 Research predicts will soon be a $7.7B market for OpenStack and a $12B+ combined market for OpenStack & containers.

Some of the world’s largest brands—AT&T, Baidu, Blizzard Entertainment, BMW, China UnionPay, Walmart, and Volvo among others—shared their open source infrastructure use cases and learnings last year. We had the opportunity to engage directly with all of our Gold and Platinum sponsors as well as numerous organizations that have not historically been involved in OpenStack directly. New contributors were on-boarded through multiple internship and mentoring programs as well as through the OpenStack Upstream Institute, which was held in seven countries last year.

We’re looking to make 2020 just as productive.

So even though the future is unknown, we can confidently predict great progress in the OSF community in 2020 as we pour our efforts into growing software projects, the open infrastructure ecosystem, and the open source movement as a whole.

Tags: airship, Kata Containers, OpenStack, StarlingX, Zuul