Inside Open Infrastructure: The latest from the OpenInfra Foundation

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While access to the internet and 4G speeds have continued to improve, the speed of those networks are expected to decline for 3.3 billion people (¾ of the world’s population). This is the digital divide.

Enter Magma, an open-source software platform that gives network operators an open, flexible and extendable mobile core network solution. The community’s goal—bring more people online to a faster internet.

Magma connects the world to a faster network by enabling service providers to build cost-effective and extensible carrier-grade networks. Magma’s disruptive approach lowers the cost of ownership of your entire mobile network. From CAPEX to OPEX, from RAN to Backhaul.

At the Magma Developers Conference last month, over 700 community members from over 50 countries gathered virtually to hear updates about the project roadmap and learn from production use cases.

The event was kicked off by announcing the neutral governance created for the Magma project where the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation) is actively participating.

“Over the last decade, networking capacity and availability has increased, but has not been evenly distributed,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director at the OpenInfra Foundation. “At the OpenInfra Foundation, we evenly distribute technology to everyone in the world and this is what Magma represents. Magma brings an opportunity for all of us to deliver core network functions in a way that’s easier, cheaper, smaller scale to be used in smaller areas and will directly meet the goals of more availability. And what’s most exciting is that it will lead to more innovation.”

Not only is Magma making strides in growing and diversifying the community, but organizations are already running the open source mobile packet core in production. WiConnect Wireless and MuralNet presented their use cases at the conference, and it seems like new users are popping up on the Slack workspace daily sharing how they are trying to run Magma in production.

Summaries of all the conference sessions will be available on the Magma blog soon, and you can watch them on the Magma Developers Conference YouTube playlist now.

If you want to learn more about Magma or participate in the community, join the mailing lists and Slack.

OpenInfra Foundation news

The next Project Teams Gathering will be a virtual event held on April 19-23, 2021. Registration is now open and team sign-up will begin next week.
InMotion Hosting, an Open Infrastructure Foundation Silver Member, launches a platform that supports the rapid deployment of small OpenStack private clouds.
- Read how InMotion Hosting establishes a foothold in the Infrastructure as a Service and Private Cloud Markets by announcing a new product Flex Metal Cloud IaaS on Superuser

Airship: Elevate your infrastructure

Are you evaluating Airship or using Airship in production? We want to learn from your experience! Take the Airship User Survey.
Airship 2.0 is Kubernetes certified!
- Airship 2.0 has been designated as a Certified Kubernetes Distribution through the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Software Conformance Program, guaranteeing that Airship provides a consistent installation of Kubernetes, supports the latest Kubernetes versions, and provides a portable cloud-native environment with other Certified Platforms.
Join Airship at the PTG in April! Registration is open.

Kata Containers: The speed of containers, the security of VMs

Kata Containers Architecture Committee Elections for February 2021 are open!
- There are two Architecture Committee seats up for election. Candidate nominations close on March 10, 2021 at 14:59 UTC. Find out how you can participate in the election process on the mailing list.
Join the Kata Containers community at the PTG in April!
- Let us know your ideas and feedback around the project about what discussions and topics you’d like to have with the community at the PTG. Learn how you can contribute here.
Kata community is working on use cases and 2021 project road map.
- Attend the Kata community use cases weekly meeting and learn how you can participate.

OpenDev Collaberatory:

2.0.0 of the git-review tool is now available. This release marks the removal of Python 2.7 support, and also no longer provides the ability to set a draft state for changes (an incomplete feature removed from Gerrit four years ago). New features include control over notification addresses, and persistent configuration options for not setting change topics and tuning auto-created branch names. A couple of different fixes are included to avoid data loss for uncommitted edits, as well as correcting a variety of other nagging problems. See the release announcement for details.

OpenStack: Open source software for creating private and public clouds

The OpenStack Technical committee passed a resolution showing support for achieving parity in the OpenStackClient with the individual per-project clients. The work being done in this space will simplify the user experience by eventually being able to use a single client for all the basic functionality.
We are already almost to Milestone 3 for Wallaby! March 11th, the focus of development switches to testing and bug fixing from new feature development. Some projects have feature freezes before then, so if you are working on getting something implemented, check the release calendar to make sure you get it done on time!
The OpenStack Technical Committee has begun collecting 2021 investment opportunities in the community. If your organization has an interest in getting involved in contributing, but doesn’t know where to start, check out this list.
Technical Elections for both Technical Committee seats and the PTL roles begin this week. Nominations run until March 9th, 2021 at 23:45 UTC. Polling begins March 12th, 2021 at 23:45 UTC. For the timeline and candidate lists (once candidates are approved), check out the election site.

StarlingX: A fully featured cloud for the distributed edge

Milestone-3 for the 5.0 release cycle is being declared this week, which means that the community will be putting focus on testing and stabilizing the release.
The community will also be starting to prepare for the 6.0 release cycle with planning new features and continuing the work on some functionality that they cannot finish during the 5.0 cycle. Stay tuned as the community plans their discussion topics around this for the upcoming PTG.

Zuul: Stop merging broken code

Zuul and Nodepool v4 are now available. These releases have been made to clearly call out that you will need to make adjustments to your deployment before upgrading to v4. All the required settings are supported in Zuul v3.19.1 and Nodepool v3.14.0. You should make these adjustments on v3 Zuul and Nodepool then upgrade to v4. Please read the release notes for Zuul and Nodepool to learn about what settings are required.
The Zuul v4 release requires a SQL database ensuring that all users get a consistent experience that includes Build and Buildset histories. All Zuul and Nodepool services need to be able to connect to the Zookeeper servers, and Zookeeper connections now require TLS.
The Zuul v4 release updates the GitHub driver to respect review requirements on Pull Requests before enqueuing into gate pipelines, and supports the Abort feature of the GitHub Checks API.

Upcoming Virtual OpenInfra and Community Events

April 19-23, Project Teams Gathering (PTG)

For more information about OpenInfra community events, please contact [email protected]

Questions / feedback / contribute

This newsletter is written and edited by the OpenInfra staff to highlight open infrastructure communities. We want to hear from you! If you have feedback, news or stories that you want to share, reach us through [email protected] . To receive the newsletter, sign up here.

Tags: airship, Kata Containers, Magma, Magma Developers Conference, newsletter, OpenInfra, OpenStack, StarlingX, Zuul