OVHcloud, Ant Group win Superuser Awards for large-scale deployment of OpenStack, innovative use of Kata Containers to reduce carbon emissions, respectively.

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OVHcloud and Ant Group have tied for top honors as co-winners of the 2022 Superuser Awards, which recognizes organizations that have used open infrastructure to improve their business while contributing back to the OpenInfra community. The news was announced today by the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation).

OVHcloud, a global cloud provider, manages 30 data centers across 12 sites on 4 continents, manufacturing its own servers, building its own data centers and deploying its own fiber-optic global network to achieve maximum efficiency. OVHcloud is currently running over 400,000 instances with 900,000 cores of OpenStack and processes over 6 million API requests every hour. The OVHcloud team deploys most of the OpenStack core components, such as Nova, Cinder, Glance, Neutron, Swift, Keystone and Horizon, as well as other components like Octavia, Barbican, Mistral, Heat, Tempest, Rally and Manila. 

The OVHcloud team has been actively involved in the OpenInfra community since 2014, including participating in meetups, summits, OpenStack Days, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and OpenInfra Live episodes. The team regularly contributes to code, including dozens of reviews, commits and bug fixes, and open sourced OS Archiver to manage data retention in the SQL databases behind OpenStack. OVHcloud has also been one of the cloud providers for the OpenStack CI/CD since 2015.

Gilles Closset, strategic technology alliances director at OVHcloud, described in his nomination of the OVHcloud team how open infrastructure aligns with one of the company’s core values: freedom. “With a strong foundation based on the open infrastructure ecosystem, OVHcloud aims to federate all players that believe in an open system where anyone stays in control of their data – to manage in an open, trustful, reversible and transparent way.”

Ant Group is an innovative technology company that aims to bring inclusive benefits and sustainable services to the world. Formally established in October 2014, it traces its origins back to Alipay, which launched in 2004.

In April 2022, Ant Group announced that it achieved carbon neutrality in 2021 by reducing 29,591.48 tons of CO2 emission with green computing technologies, including Kata Containers.

“Thanks to the strong isolation of Kata Containers, we can deploy online applications and batch jobs together on thousands of nodes without significant interference,” wrote Xu Wang, senior staff engineer at Ant Group, in his nomination of the Ant Group Kata Containers team. “By adopting Kata Containers and other related technologies, we have reduced half of the per-payment energy consumption in the recent Double-Eleven e-Shopping Festival, compared to three years ago.”

Comprising more than 30 members, the Kata Containers team at Ant Group is responsible for the container-related R&D of the company and working for sustainable IT infrastructure. Many of the team members have been active upstream Kata Containers project contributors and maintainers since the first day of the project. In addition, the team has organized events, drafted roadmaps, led feature developments, enriched documentation, fixed bugs and helped other users to adopt Kata Containers in production.

Download the Ant Group Kata Containers White Paper

The Kata Containers team at Ant Group has published a white paper titled, “Kata Containers Best Practices at Ant Group” available here.

Read More about the 2022 Superuser Awards Nominees

Launched at the Paris Summit in 2014, the Superuser Awards recognizes open infrastructure users who are making a difference in the Openinfra community and demonstrating how open infrastructure software is providing strategic value in their organization. The community submits nominees to Superuser, and the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board determines the winners. 

In addition to OVHcloud and Ant Group, 2022 nominees included:

  • Arvan Cloud
  • CanaryBit
  • Daniel Byström
  • Fairbanks
  • Inspur
  • Jiangsu Suzhong Construction Group Co., IT Team 
  • OpenMetal
  • Volvo Cars Corporation
  • Zhejiang Expressway Co., Ltd., IT Team
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