2020 Annual Report: OpenInfra Event Highlights

As many organizations experienced in 2020, the Open Infrastructure (OpenInfra) Foundation had several challenging decisions to make as the pandemic began to spread around the world. Having the safety of the community as the top priority, the decision was made to move the entire 2020 programs, including the PTG (Project Teams Gathering), OpenDev series, and OpenInfra Summit to a virtual format. With the help of the Foundation and event sponsors, partners, and the support of the entire community, we were able to continue our mission to collaborate, share knowledge, network, and continue improving the software with the broadest global reach ever despite the inherent challenges of the year.

OpenInfra Summit

The first virtual OpenInfra Summit was held in October 2020, gathering 10,000 attendees (largest Summit attendance to date) from 120+ different countries to discuss 30+ open source projects. In addition to use cases from users like Volvo Cars Corporation, Ant Group, GE Digital, Société Générale, China Mobile, European Weather Cloud, Workday, and China Tower- plus a big announcement about the future of the Foundation:

The Summit kicked off with the Keynote announcement that the OpenStack Foundation was officially becoming the OpenInfra Foundation
Volvo Cars Corporation discussed how it successfully uses Zuul for continuous integration in a range of different software components, and how Zuul is a game changer that helps them avoid merging broken code.
Ant Group, the leading peer-to-peer payments processor in China, presented why isolation methods such as scheduling isolation and LLC isolation are used in combination with Kata Containers.
GE Digital presented the tools, migration procedure, and highlighted the biggest challenges in upgrading from OpenStack Newton to Queens with minimal downtime.
SK Telecom 5GX Labs won the 12th Superuser Award for developing a containerized OpenStack on Kubernetes solution called SKT All Container Orchestrator (TACO), based on OpenStack-helm and Airship, all while contributing upstream to both the OpenStack and Airship projects.

Summit videos are available on the Summit videos page. Thank you to our Summit sponsors for supporting the event!

OpenInfra TV: Bringing the Summit to Asia

At the annual OpenInfra events, the global community convenes to discuss the challenges and success of integrating different open source projects. Averaging attendees from over 60 countries at face-to-face events and attracting attendees from over 120 countries for the virtual OpenInfra Summit, the Foundation events team concentrates on making sure all events cater to the diversity of the audience.

For the virtual event, time zones were one of the biggest challenges as one block of time is never perfect for every single person in the world. The team selected four communities to pilot OpenInfra TV—China, India, Japan, and Korea—to provide local coverage of Summit highlights presented by community leaders in their local language.

OpenDev

The OpenDev event, held in-person in previous years, was a three part virtual series that focused on three topics: Large-scale Usage of OpenInfra Software, Hardware Automation, and Containers in Production.

OpenDev events bring together the developers and users of the open source software powering today’s infrastructure, to share best practices, identify gaps, and advance the state of the art in OpenInfra. For each topic, participants joined discussion oriented, collaborative sessions where they explored challenges, shared common architectures, and collaborated around potential solutions. Each topic’s agenda was set by a programming committee made up of community members who met for weeks leading up to the event to make sure it was tailored to the broader community.

The three events gathered over 2,000 registrants from over 70 countries.

Here are some of the highlights:

Large-scale Usage of OpenInfra Software – June 2020

The event kicked off with user stories from Blizzard Entertainment, OpenInfra Labs, and Verizon who shared their own scaling challenges in short presentations followed by Q&A. After that, the discussion focused on a variety of topics including upgrades, high availability (HA) networking, bare metal, and more. At the conclusion of the event, participants looking to get further involved were encouraged to join the OpenStack Large Scale SIG to continue sharing challenges and solutions around scaling.

Thank you to the programming committee members: Beth Cohen, Roman Gorshunov, Belmiro Moreira, Masahito Muroi, and Allison Price!

Read the full recap and catch up on the discussion recordings.

Hardware Automation – July 2020

This OpenDev event focused on topics around hardware provisioning lifecycle for bare metal, bare metal infrastructure, networking and network security. Participants representing over 200 companies spent three days sharing their knowledge and discussing their experience of building and operating software that automates their hardware in cloud environments. One of the ways mentioned to keep the momentum going after this event was to join the OpenStack Multi Arch SIG and OpenStack Bare Metal SIG to continue sharing challenges and solutions around Hardware Automation. Julia Kreger also highlighted the latest white paper from the OpenStack Bare Metal SIG: “Building the Future on Bare Metal, How Ironic Delivers Abstraction and Automation using Open Source Infrastructure.”

Thank you to the programming committee members: Keith Berger, Mark Collier, Julia Kreger, Mohammed Naser, and James Penick!

PTGs / Forums

In June of 2020, we hosted our very first virtual Project Teams Gathering. We were pleased to have over 700 people register for the event – more than we’ve had for any in person PTG. By taking it virtual instead of in-person, we had new people participate that have otherwise never been able to attend the PTG. Over the course of the week, 44 teams across Airship, Kata Containers, OpenStack, StarlingX, and Zuul met to discuss their upcoming releases and make progress on standing items. The format of the PTG was different than any event we’ve hosted before because it was all virtual and we needed to accommodate for all timezones. We settled on 4 hour blocks of working hours with 4 hours inbetween and allowed teams to schedule themselves to better fit their day to day schedules and time zone restrictions. The PTG again made use of the community developed PTGbot with some tweaks to help keep people aware of active discussions and find where and when teams were meeting.

The community had two options to use for their video meetings: the OpenInfra Foundation subsidized Zoom rooms, or the OpenDev team hosted meetpad rooms. Many teams wrote up summaries of their discussions and accomplishments throughout the week:

We continued to meet virtually throughout the year and the week after our first Virtual OpenInfra summit, we decided to again, keep people safe, and run it like we did in June. In October of 2020 the teams met on Zoom and in Meetpad to talk to each other and collaborate. Over 500 people registered for the event spanning 45 countries. The event hosted community members across 46 teams and had their usual technical discussions which you can find summarized here:

OpenStack Days / OpenInfra Days / Cloud Operator Days

Overcoming the local challenges of the pandemic, the global OpenInfra community organized four OpenStack/OpenInfra Day events (a combination of virtual and face-to-face in Turkey, China, Indonesia and Korea – educating over 10,000 attendees around the world.

The typical attendee reached at these local events are cloud and IT architects, software developers, platform and solution engineers and product management.

The Tokyo community introduced a new local event, Cloud Operator Days, a two day online event that gathered 1,400 attendees to discuss challenges of operating cloud infrastructure.

These one or two day regional events are organized by the local community and supported by the OpenInfra Foundation to include project workshops, upstream training, and booths from the local ecosystem. These events continue to be an excellent touchstone for the community to engage with our ecosystem, and to gather local open source developers and users to collaborate, share use cases, and support for the OpenInfra projects.

Looking forward to 2021…

Thank you to everyone in the OpenInfra community for all of the work that went into 2020 and is continuing in 2021 to contribute and support the community! Check out the full 2020 Annual Report, join the OpenInfra community to build the next decade of OpenInfra, and learn about what events to expect for 2021.

Tags: 2020 Annual Report, Cloud Operator Days, events, Open Infrastructure Summit, OpenDev, OpenInfra, OpenInfra Days, OpenInfra TV, OpenStack Days, PTGs