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Inside Open Infrastructure: The Latest from the OpenInfra Foundation

StarlingX 5.0, OpenInfra Live episodes, projects updates and more

June 7, 2021
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Spotlight on: StarlingX 5.0

Edge computing opened up new possibilities by taking cloud and automation into industries where technology evolution is still in the early stages and with that it is putting high demands on infrastructure, both hardware and software. The StarlingX community has been working tirelessly to fine tune the platform for these new requirements and they have just put out the 5th release of the software with focus on areas such as security and performance.

StarlingX 5.0 integrates a new open source building block, Vault, into the platform for secret management. Contributors also made improvements to the certification management functionality for more automation.

To meet the computing power and performance requirements of edge, support for hardware acceleration has become key, and that is reflected in StarlingX 5.0 as well. The 5.0 version now provides support for Nvidia GPUs as well as the possibility to update images on FPGAs through StarlingX.

To help bring the technology to new industries the community added a new feature, called edgeworker nodes, that is a new personality distinguished from ‘worker’ nodes. With this functionality you can now add devices like industrial PCs on factory floors, to a StarlingX environment with only installing a few agents on them. Beyond this use case, edgeworker nodes are usually deployed close to an edge device, such as an I/O device, a camera, a servo motor or a sensor, to manage host-based enrollment.

For the complete list of updates and new features in StarlingX R5.0, check out the release notes and the project documentation.

Visit the StarlingX website today for further information about the project, check out the code, or download the image to deploy the platform and try out the new features.

OpenInfra Foundation news

  • Over 60 organizations support the OpenInfra Foundation’s mission of building communities who write software that runs in production. To support the growth of the following OpenInfra communities, join the Foundation.
  • The OpenInfra Foundation supported the launch of the first region of the OpenInfra Labs Cloud Network. OpenInfra Labs will enable the cloud services and network deployed in this founding region to be replicated to other regions, federated between these regions and extended beyond academia. Get involved!

OpenInfra Live

Airship: Elevate your infrastructure

  • Airship community IRC channels moved from Freenode to the OFTC network at the end of May. IRC users should adjust their client configuration accordingly.
  • Running or evaluating Airship? We want to hear from you! Take the brief User Survey to provide the community with feedback
  • Airship has a new HackMD troubleshooting guide! Check it out here.

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

  • During the past few months the Kata Containers community has been working on new features and bug fixes that are now materialized as the 2.1.0 release, which went out on Friday, May 14th.
  • 1.x is no longer being maintained & changes in the maintained branch
    • Kata Containers 1.x has reached EOL (End of Life) and is no longer being maintained, the repositories have been archived, and all the issues were closed
    • With the release of 2.1.0, the community decided to reevaluate the stable branch maintenance window for the project.
    • Learn more about the 2.1.0 release and the end of life / end of support of 1.x repos on the Kata Containers blogs.
  • SOFAMeetup in Shanghai, China on May 22
    • Community members from Ant Group represented and delivered Kata sessions at the Meetup. Read the recap on WeChat
  • Hackathon in Beijing, China on May 28-29
    • Kata containers community members gathered at Hackathon to discuss features and bug fixes.
  • The Kata Architecture Committee agreed to move its community IRC channels from Freenode to the OFTC network at the end of May. IRC users should adjust their client configuration accordingly.

OpenDev: Open Source Software Development at Scale

  • The OpenDev Collaboratory relocated its IRC services and channels from Freenode to the OFTC network at the end of May. Read more about what that means on the service-discuss mailing list.

OpenStack: Open source software for creating private and public clouds

  • The OpenStack Technical Committee agreed to move its community IRC channels from Freenode to the OFTC network at the end of May. Their statement on the openstack-discuss mailing list outlines important information and instructions for IRC users.
  • The Openstack community is in critical need of help in maintaining Infrastructure services- Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Elastic-recheck. If you’re interested in how they are operated at scale and getting involved, please contact the OpenDev team or the OpenStack Infrastructure team! 
  • ‘Y’ release naming nominations are underway! Feel free to propose eligible names on this wiki page. Submissions are open until June 10th. 
  • If you have suggestions for the ‘Y’ release community goals, please add them to this etherpad!
  • The COA exam is the only professional certification offered by the OpenInfra Foundation. The exam is written for OpenStack professionals with at least 6 months of experience managing an OpenStack cloud environment. The Training Marketplace lists companies that can help you prepare with their training courses.

StarlingX: A fully featured cloud for the distributed edge

Zuul: Stop merging broken code

Upcoming Virtual OpenInfra and Community Events

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.

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