Note from the Chair of the OpenInfra Foundation Board of Directors

Allison Randal, Board Chair

While 2021 was a year of continued uncertainty around a pandemic that still hasn't quite managed to end, for many it was also a year of contemplation. The trend has many different names, including the "Great Resignation," but the name that seems most apt to me is the "Great Reprioritization." One silver lining in the pandemic cloud has been a chance to put the daily grind on hold, opening up a bit of headspace for strategic thinking, for reflecting on who we are, where we want to go, and how we'll get there. This is not only true for individuals, but also for organizations and projects.

After launching as the Open Infrastructure (OpenInfra) Foundation in 2020, last year has been about fully embracing our new identity, combining healthy doses of both welcoming the new and cleaning out a few dusty corners of the old. We spent time thinking about the support our projects need, and how we can get better at delivering the "long-term care & feeding" that sustains projects and helps them to grow and succeed, including how we fund project-specific needs. We spent time thinking about how to recognize the diverse contributions of a broader array of organizations in our community, and added two new classes of membership to help with that: Associate Members (non-profit and educational organizations) and Silver Members. We're all looking forward to gathering in person again as soon as it's safe, but in 2021 we got better at virtual communication, engaging within our community and reaching out to other communities, through regular thought-provoking topics on OpenInfra Live and OpenInfra Live Keynotes, project coordination and planning at the Project Teams Gatherings (PTGs), and informal strategic discussions.

Successful open source isn't automatic or trivial; it requires strategic focus, a dedication to best practices in community governance, open collaboration, and technical excellence, and active engagement from all involved. Like most worthwhile endeavors, successful open source takes persistence and hard work. It is awe-inspiring to look back on what we've accomplished in open infrastructure over the past decade, through shared effort for shared benefit, and I can't wait to see what we'll do in the next decade.

It has been an honor to serve the OpenInfra community as Board Chair in 2021. My personal thanks go out to every person in our staff, board, project leaders, and participants, for all you contribute to open infrastructure and open source.

OpenInfra Delivers More, More, More

Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director, OpenInfra Foundation

When 2021 began, we were celebrating the launch of the OpenInfra Foundation and seating our new Board of Directors. At that time, I concluded my annual letter to the community by predicting “the next decade will see more innovation, collaboration, and open source software running in production.”

In hindsight, I should have said the next year will see more, more and much more! In fact, the year 2021 has been defined by “more”:

• More OpenInfra in production than ever
• More community collaboration
• More OpenInfra projects
• More cross-project integration

and…

More code!

This year we documented a leap in OpenStack cores in production—a year-on-year growth of 66%—and reached a massive milestone: 25 million OpenStack compute cores in production! Well over 100 new OpenStack clouds were established this year alone, and existing users have expanded their deployments. In fact, seven organizations are now running over 1 million cores, including China Mobile, Line, WalmartLabs, Workday and Yahoo. The user survey documented explosive growth among OpenStack clouds of all sizes. Across the world, 175 OpenStack-powered public cloud data centers are running across more than 80 different providers, serving organizations in nearly every industry.

OpenStack joins Linux and Kubernetes as three of the four most active open source projects in the world (the fourth is Chromium). And what makes this even more impressive is that one of the most popular approaches to digital infrastructure today is to use all three projects in combination: Linux is the open source operating system standard, OpenStack is the open source cloud standard, and Kubernetes is the open source standard for container orchestration. Put them together and you have the LOKI stack: Linux, OpenStack & Kubernetes Infrastructure. Increasingly, LOKI is the way that the world delivers reliable and scalable infrastructure. With more than 150,000 code contributions a year among the three projects, the open source communities behind LOKI are constantly innovating and ensuring that critical infrastructure capabilities are available to everyone. That’s a wonderful thing.

Speaking of code contributions and collaboration, I want to personally thank all of the developers who contributed to OpenInfra projects this year. All of our projects had major releases this year, despite the pandemic, and each of our projects saw an expansion of contributing organizations and use cases in production.

Our community continues to grow in organizational support as well. 2021 saw a 25% increase in supporting members, including our newest Platinum Member, Microsoft. We also established a new membership category, Associate Members, to welcome non-profit, academic and research organizations who support and rely on Open Infrastructure to achieve their missions. We were able to welcome long-time community participants like CERN, ARDC, Boston University, OW2, Ceph and others in the initial group of Associate Members this year.

In November, we were excited to welcome the Taibai project and its contributors into the OpenInfra family. Originally developed by FiberHome, Taibai is a new generation of multi-cloud management platform. The production-proven project will be nurtured and developed under OpenInfra Labs.

Despite the challenges of the ongoing pandemic, the OpenInfra community has been able to maintain amazing progress in cross-project collaboration, integration, and code development. This was highlighted in OpenInfra Live Keynotes, an event that featured an incredible slate of speakers and participants from more than 70 countries. One of the special highlights was having industry leaders from Microsoft and AWS endorse and embrace “The Four Opens.” The enthusiasm, camaraderie, and inspiring vision of the OpenInfra community was on full display during this online gathering, so just imagine what awaits us when we reconvene in person at the OpenInfra Summit Berlin in June 2022!

2021 was a great start to “the next decade of Open Infrastructure,” and the best is yet to come. OpenInfra is entirely people powered, so please join us in our mission to make sure everybody in the world has an opportunity to contribute to and use this critical software.

State of OpenInfra

Thierry Carrez, VP of Engineering, OpenInfra Foundation

During the last 20 years, computing saw the addition of more and more abstraction layers (virtualization, cloud APIs, application orchestration…). With that evolution we saw the emergence of a new role: the infrastructure provider. Infrastructure providers are tasked with providing, maintaining and evolving the computing, networking and storage infrastructure that others use to deploy their applications and store their data on.

Before 2010, providing infrastructure had traditionally been the realm of proprietary hardware and software. That’s when OpenStack was started, and it changed the game. By proposing an open source solution to build a pure infrastructure as a service cloud, OpenStack bootstrapped the concept of open infrastructure: pure open source solutions for infrastructure providers.

The huge success of OpenStack was soon emulated by other open infrastructure solutions, like Kubernetes. Following a similar open development model, Kubernetes standardized the application deployment layer and gave birth to the cloud-native landscape. But cloud native assumes that there is a cloud underneath – and the way to do it using open source solutions is to combine Kubernetes with OpenStack, to provide the lower level infrastructure it needs. Like Jonathan mentioned, that’s the LOKI stack: Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes Infrastructure.

There are of course numerous other software components in the OpenInfra landscape. Some of them were created after OpenStack, like Kata Containers, allowing infrastructure providers to offer secure container runtimes to their users. Some others, like Ceph, were created before, but OpenStack gave them the exposure they deserved within an OpenInfra stack.

That is what the past decade looked like. A time for pioneers to take hold in a space where only proprietary solutions existed before. What will the next decade look like? All signs point to more usage of open source in infrastructure: more software components, deployed everywhere and at all scales.

If 2021 is any guide, we observed a dramatic increase in the number of deployments reported in our OpenStack user survey: +66% growth year-over-year. We now count 25 million CPU cores managed by OpenStack. That increase comes from existing users dramatically increasing their footprint, with users like Walmart or LINE running over 1 million cores each and China Mobile running over 6 million. But it is also coming from lots of new users.

What are the trends driving this increase in OpenInfra adoption? The first one is the rise of digital sovereignty concerns, as lots of countries (and companies) are waking up to the vulnerability of handing over all their infrastructure needs to potential adversaries. This explains the recent increase in the number of public clouds powered by OpenStack, but it also explains the appetite for more open source solutions for providing infrastructure, beyond OpenStack.

The second trend is niche players pursuing innovating business models. Open infrastructure makes that permissionless innovation possible. Startups like OneQode or Exaion provide infrastructure for very specific use cases, leveraging open infrastructure solutions. That is my favorite aspect of open infrastructure: enabling everyone to play with this technology and innovate.

Ten years in, open infrastructure has grown beyond the pioneers, and it’s here to stay. At the OpenInfra Foundation, we want to nurture this movement and help shape what the future of open infrastructure looks like. We are just getting started. Join us!

State of OpenInfra in China

The OpenInfra community in China is very active across multiple open source projects, including OpenStack, Kata Containers and OpenInfra Labs. In 2021, a lot of regional progress was made across these communities.

OpenStack Wallaby and Xena Release

The upstream OpenStack community in China is very active and typically the second country in terms of contributors. In 2021, there were two OpenStack releases: 

• Wallaby - 108 contributors from China, and these contributors are from 99cloud, ​​China Mobile, China Unicom, EasyStack, Haiyun, Huawei, Inspur, Kylin Cloud, ZTE and more. 
• Xena - 62 contributors from China, from member companies, 99cloud, Awcloud, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Inspur, Fiberhome, Huawei, ZTE. 

Over 70% of OpenStack deployments in China are in production.

65% of organizations run hybrid cloud, but the majority run over half of their overall cloud infrastructure on OpenStack. Worldwide, 25 million cores of OpenStack are run in production, and China Mobile is one of the largest users, running 6 million cores in production. As the 2nd most active country of the OpenInfra Community, the top industries for OpenStack deployments in China include:

• Academic / Research 
• Energy
• Finance
• IT
• Telecom

New projects contributed by the community in China

There are three projects open sourced and upstreamed to the community:

1. Venus project - a one-stop solution OpenStack component to log collection, cleaning, indexing, analysis, alarm, visualization, report generation, etc. 
2. Skyline project - an OpenStack dashboard optimized by UI and UE. It has a modern technology stack and ecology, is easier for developers to maintain and operate by users, and has higher concurrency performance.
3. Taibai project - an open source multi-cloud management platform, has been shared with the OpenInfra Labs Cloud Network. It takes advantage of a microservices framework to deliver a scalable and customizable multi-cloud platform that enterprises can use to simplify multi-cloud management and improve the efficiency of cloud resource utilization.

Kata Containers Growth in China

There were 23 Kata Containers releases in 2021. In these releases, 24 out of 94 global contributors are from China, submitting 291 changes out of overall 1471 changes in a year. These contributors are from 6 and more organizations. 

Product adoption got more cases as well this year, with at least 3 local organizations adopting Kata in their container service product, out of 7+ user cases globally.

OpenInfra Days China

The OpenInfra Days in China in 2020 was hosted on Oct 15-16, Beljing. There were 886 attended the event in-person, with over 100,000 attendees tuning in online. Other than the interactive forums, the event included sessions from five tracks which are 

• 5G Infra
• Cloud Native Infra
• Open Governance
• Compute/Network Convergence
• Cloud Infra

To Infinity and Beyond: OpenInfra Foundation Membership Growth

Jimmy McArthur, Senior Manager Community & Business Development, OpenInfra Foundation

This was the first year that the OpenInfra Foundation began operating under a new name and things have changed dramatically since 2012 when we created the OpenStack Foundation. Our mission is to build communities who write open source software that runs in production. The reason for this evolution was to help expand our scope into the entire realm of open infrastructure to meet the demands and scope that our users and members are seeing in their day-to-day business.

As a result of that expanded scope, 2021 provided an opportunity to increase growth and create new avenues for community activity. Like Thierry mentioned, new data sovereignty rules popping up in Europe, Asia, and South America have led to an explosion of organizations looking for secure data infrastructure for both private and public clouds. This created an environment where organizations from very small to very large turned to OpenStack as the de facto open source cloud solution. At the same time our membership grew around Zuul and use and adoption of our Kata Containers projects continued to increase. Overall, it’s clear that the move to open infrastructure was the right one for our Foundation.

• 24 new member organizations from 10 separate countries, creating a 25% member growth for the Foundation
• Microsoft came on as a new Platinum Member
• Nipa Cloud came on as a new Gold Member
• 22 new Silver Members
• 12 Associate Members joined to support the mission of the OpenInfra Foundation
• Particular growth was seen in Korea, SE Asia, Germany, and the Nordic region
• Acme Gating, a Zuul consultancy, and Vexxhost, Zuul as a Service, are members supporting the Zuul project at the Foundation Member level
• Strategic growth areas emerged including public cloud, hybrid cloud, HPC, Kata Containers, as well as adjacent solutions such as storage, metering & monitoring

The number of organizations running our projects is increasing daily and we’re incredibly excited about opportunities to continue to grow Foundation membership into 2022 and beyond. If you would like to build the next decade of open infrastructure with us, let me know!

Introducing: OpenInfra Foundation Associate Members

Thierry Carrez, VP of Engineering, OpenInfra Foundation

This year we introduced a new class of non-voting members of the Foundation called the Associate member class. It was created on June 29, 2021 by a resolution of the Foundation Board of Directors, in an effort to recognize and work closer together with two types of organizations.

The first type of Associate members is non-profit organizations sustaining open infrastructure projects. Open infrastructure goes beyond our Foundation, and we have been collaborating closely with numerous adjacent organizations over the years, sometimes becoming affiliate members of those organizations, engaging in co-marketing opportunities or sharing events. But until now we did not have a way to recognize and promote that collaboration on our end. Several organizations like OW2, the Ceph Foundation, the Open Source Business Alliance (home for the Sovereign Cloud Stack project) or the SODA Foundation have signed up on this new program.

The second type of Associate members is notable academic and public research institutions making extensive use of open infrastructure projects. Since the early days of OpenStack with NASA’s direct involvement, our Foundation has a long history of working closely together with academic and public research organizations, supporting them in their usage of open source solutions for their infrastructure needs. Several prestigious institutions have joined this program since its inception, including CERN, ARDC (home for the NECTAR cloud in Australia), Boston University, Oregon State University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Monash University, or IMT Atlantique.

If you are interested in joining this program, please reach out to [email protected].

OpenInfra Project Updates

Since Airship was announced as an OpenInfra Foundation pilot project at the 2018 OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, it has provided operators with a unified, fully-declarative, versatile platform that transforms bare-metal infrastructure into a resilient Kubernetes cluster supporting user-defined workloads. At the Denver Open Infrastructure Summit in 2019, the Airship project committed to overhauling the platform by improving document management, re-imagining the upgrade workflow, and utilizing additional Cloud Native projects to provide Airship functionality with the next generation of Airship: Airship 2.

In April 2021, the community achieved the ultimate objective for Airship 2: provide a declarative interface to assemble and orchestrate best-of-breed Cloud Native building blocks for provisioning and life-cycling Kubernetes clouds and the resulting software stack. Airship 2 takes cloud native projects like Cluster API, Kustomize, Metal3, and the Helm-Controller and integrates them into an end-to-end solution with a smooth operator experience.

Airship 2 has also 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.

A few of the notable high level goals Airship 2 accomplishes include:

• Declarative intentions
• Simplified control
• Support for multiple use cases, like workloads from CI/CD to CNFs to VNFs
• Support for a variety of infrastructure backends and operating system choices from public clouds to VMs to bare metal

Shortly following Airship 2, version 2.1 was released with a multitude of enhancements in November.

Learn more in the Airship 2 Release Notes.

Looking into 2022, other features such SR-IOV and IPv6/v4 Dual Stack are being worked on and discussed as candidate features for inclusion in a future release.

On the community side, Airship decided to merge the Technical and Working Committees into a single seven-member Technical Committee (TC) due to the numerous overlapping responsibilities. The current TC members are Drew Walters (Microsoft), Jan-Erik Mångs (Ericsson), Alexey Odinokov (Mirantis), John “JT” Williams (Dell), Alex Bailey (Microsoft), Matt McEuen (Microsoft), and Ruslan Aliev (Mirantis).

Get involved:

• Code: opendev.org/airship
• IRC: #airshipit on OFTC
• Slack: airshipit.slack.com
• Mailing lists: lists.airshipit.org
• Website: airshipit.org

Kata Containers continues to deliver the speed of containers with the security of virtual machines. Kata Containers became a pilot project in December 2017, in conjunction with the Open Infrastructure Foundation’s evolution from being the home for OpenStack to becoming the home of open infrastructure collaboration. In April of 2019, Kata Containers was the first Open Infrastructure Foundation pilot project to graduate, becoming an official open infrastructure project. In 2021, Kata Containers continued to expand its use cases and gain more users.

Kata Containers started by providing stronger isolation than traditional containers. In 2021, the Kata Containers community expanded Kata Containers’ usage scenario from security isolation to also cover performance isolation. It prevents different workloads from affecting each other in both security and performance aspects. Kata Containers is also supporting confidential containers use case with TDX/SEV/IBM SE enabled isolation, further expanding Kata Containers’ threat model from protecting the infrastructure to also protecting the workloads.

In 2021, the Kata Containers community continues to present its strategic relevance, well-defined governance procedures, commitment to technical best practices and open collaboration, and, most importantly, an actively engaged ecosystem of developers and users.

The project continues to cultivate a global, engaged, and growing community as evidenced by the 2021 stats: 23 major/stable releases with 1,400 plus commits made by 95 authors from 16 organizations. The top five contributing companies include Intel, Red Hat, Ant Group, IBM, and Apple.

Kata Containers production deployments continued to expand in 2021, for example:

• In recent years, Kata Containers helped Ant Group build up the sustainable IT infrastructure. Thanks to the strong isolation of Kata Containers, Ant Group could deploy online applications and batch jobs together on thousands of nodes without significant interference. As a result of adopting Kata Containers and other related technologies, Ant Group reduced half of the per-payment energy consumption in the recent Double-Eleven e-Shopping Festival compared to three years ago. Part of the deployment has been upgraded to a 3.0 pre-release version of the integrated rust shim and sandbox, which is open-sourced and being reviewed by the community as a major feature of Kata 3.0.
• Red Hat provides Kata Containers as a secondary container runtime for OpenShift Clusters with OpenShift sandboxed containers. OpenShift sandboxed containers use the Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) to declaratively configure and customize the entire Kata Containers deployment and day 2 customizations. The end result is additional isolation with the same cloud-native user experience.
• The Kata Containers project's continued innovation and deep community expertise is why IBM believes it to be the best solution for strongly isolating customer's production CI/CD workloads.
• Exotanium leverages the Kata Containers architecture to implement a new cloud resource management technology with the capability of performing transparent live migration of containers. With this technology, Exotanium X-Spot offers a new solution of running stateful, long-running workloads in AWS EC2 Spot instances and relocating containers before they are terminated.
• Nubificus builds on Kata Containers to deliver an interoperable serverless framework for cloud and edge resources that enables user functions to use hardware acceleration without direct access to the hardware.

The Kata Containers Architecture Committee also went through two election cycles: one in February and another one in September, 2021. Now, the project is led by Archana Shinde (Intel), Eric Ernst (Apple), Fabiano Fidêncio (Intel), Samuel Ortiz (Apple), and Tao Peng (Ant Group). The Architecture Committee members ensure that Kata Containers continues to be aligned with its goal of open collaboration and innovation around container speed and security.

Looking ahead to 2022, Kata Containers is evolving with a new rust-based runtime with integrated sandbox. It will further reduce Kata Containers memory footprint as well as installation and management complexity. Besides the new rust-based runtime, the Kata Containers community will continue putting the focus on improving its integration to the cloud native ecosystem, and supporting the confidential container use case. The community is planning a new major release 3.0 targeting the middle of 2022.

The Kata Containers’ project code is hosted on Github under the Apache 2 license. Learn about Kata Containers, how to contribute and support the community at katacontainers.io. Join these channels to get involved:

• Code: github.com/kata-containers
• Slack: katacontainers.slack.com
• IRC: #kata-dev on OFTC
• Mailing lists: lists.katacontainers.io
• Website: katacontainers.io

Building on the  Mass Open Cloud (MOC), a real-world platform delivering open source projects as services, OI Labs is and incubator for new approaches to the all-open source cloud focused on bridging the gap between operators and developers and delivering open source tools to build and run cloud, container, AI, big data and edge workloads efficiently, repeatedly, and predictably.

The efforts associated with OI Labs frequently overlap multiple open source projects - for example: 

• Cloud in a Box: Prescriptive Cloud Installations which encompass monitoring, onboarding, offboarding, and billing/reporting.  The initial implementations of this include:
• The New England Research Cloud (NERC) project by Boston University and Harvard University, integrating OpenStack and Openshift with standard Research Computing productions systems such as the ColdFront resource allocation management systems as a basis for a standardized research computing software stack.
• The Community Cloud , based on the Operate First Project incubated at OI Labs, is focused on incorporating operational experience into the development of software projects rather than as an afterthought.
• Project Caerus:  Project Caerus is an initiative focused on bridging the gap between distributed compute and distributed storage platforms commonly used for big data and AI applications. Caerus aims to create a new open ecosystem that allows compute and storage platforms from different sources to operate in a concerted fashion to substantially improve application performance, resource utilization, and application developer productivity.
• Elastic Secure Infrastructure (ESI): A set of services/systems to permit multiple tenants to flexibly allocate baremetal machines from a pool of available hardware, create networks, attach baremetal nodes and networks, and optionally provision an operating system on those systems through the use of an associated provisioning service.  The code development features a mix of upstream OpenStack work (ironic and networking-ansible) and custom ESI code.  
• Project Wenju: Addressing the “last mile” challenges of moving AI projects into production.
• Project Taibai: Taibai takes advantage of a microservices framework to deliver a scalable and customizable multi-cloud platform that enterprises can use to simplify multi-cloud management and improve the efficiency of cloud resource utilization. The Taibai unified service portal allows users, administrators and operators to manage diverse cloud architectures and third-party integration across multiple data centers and public clouds.  Your may view the introduction of the project at this link:Project Taibai

Key Highlights from 2021

April 2021

• Red Hat provided $551.9 million in software subscriptions to support the first region of the OpenInfra Labs Cloud Network

May - December 2021

• Operate First moves from proof of concept to community cloud model
• Initial Replication of Operate First OpenShift environment into Mass Open Cloud as POC of Cloud-in-a-Box.
• NERC project integrates with ColdFront resource management, initial onboarding of pilot projects 1Q

November, 2021

• Project Tabai Announced

OpenStack continues to be one of the most active open source communities with more than 25 million cores in production. This year, the OpenStack community continued to produce more software that is run in production. Notable highlights include:

• Wallaby: Wallaby, the 23rd release of OpenStack, was developed by over 800 contributors from 140 organizations in 45 countries. Comprised of more than 17,000 code changes, Wallaby focused on integration with other open source projects like CEPH, Kubernetes, and Prometheus. OpenStack continues to be the third most active open source project (along with the Linux kernel and Chromium).
• Xena: The Xena release brought with it better integration amongst OpenStack projects, support for advanced hardware features, and reduction of technical debt. Nova's support for SmartNICs and ECMP routes in Neutron are a few of the hardware features now supported. Together, over 680 contributors worked in a short 25 weeks to present the 24th release of OpenStack.
• Technical Writing SIG Dissolution: After successfully migrating the docs to project repositories several releases ago, and mostly maintaining an advisory role now, the Technical Writing SIG decided to dissolve and migrate the last of their repositories to other teams. At the PTG, the Technical Writing SIG Chair met with the Technical Committee and the First Contact SIG worked out a plan to retire the Technical Writing SIG.
• Skyline: OpenStack welcomed its newest project since the addition of Adjutant in 2018! Skyline is an OpenStack dashboard built with React as an alternative to the Horizon dashboard. While not ready for production use just yet, the dashboard is engineered so that functions directly call OpenStack APIs to make maintaining the dashboard easier for developers and interactions faster and more efficient for users. This effort has been supported by the Horizon team as a future replacement once Skyline's functionality gets closer to parity with Horizon. The Technical Committee accepted with with the caveat that Skyline with be labeled as a 'tech preview' until it undergoes the changes to bring it more in line with how other OpenStack services are organized and released.
• TC Stance on OpenStackClient: The Technical Committee formalized their stance on the OpenStackClient in a resolution this year. Instead of making the development of OpenStackClient a community wide goal, but still wanting to show support and stand with the OpenStackClient team, they settled on a resolution with the intention of circling back to evaluate if the OpenStack community is ready for the OpenStackClient community goal.
• IRC Network Migration: There was a change in ownership, organization structure, and policy in Freenode, the IRC network that the community has made use of for years. In response, the community discussed alternatives and settled on migrating over to a different network, but keeping IRC as the synchronous chat platform our community uses. As of late May, the OpenStack community has moved to the OFTC Network. Most teams were a part of this transition.

Get involved:

• Code: opendev.org/openstack
• IRC: OpenStack channels on OFTC
• Mailing lists: lists.openstack.org
• Website: openstack.org

More OpenStack in Production than Ever

Allison Price, Director of Marketing & Community, OpenInfra Foundation

In November 2020, the OpenStack community celebrated 15 million cores in production. Just 12 months later, over 25 million cores were recorded in the annual OpenStack User Survey, marking 66% growth compared to 2020. This growth was seen among organizations of all sizes, including seven organizations who were recording over 1 million cores in production.

Walmart, LINE, Workday, China Mobile, and Verizon Media were among the founding members of the OpenStack Million Core Club. They were recognized during the OpenInfra Live: Keynotes, celebrating their incredible scale and innovation with OpenStack.

OpenStack Certified Administrator (COA) Exam

Anton Renski , Technical Training Coordinator, Mirantis

The Certified OpenStack Administrator exam is the only professional certification offered by the OpenInfra Foundation.

In 2021,

• COA exam vouchers were purchased: 109
• 193 students passed

Among the exam takers, students were from 29 countries, including

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• Bolivia
• China
• Columbia
• Cyprus
• Egypt
• France
• Germany
• Ghana
• Guatemala
• Hungary
• India
• Indonesia
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Peru
• Poland
• Russia
• Saudi Arabia
• Singapore
• Spain
• Switzerland
• Thailand
• Turkey
• Uganda
• Ukraine
• Vietnam

StarlingX is an open source community that is supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. The project integrates together well-known open source projects such as Ceph, Kubernetes, the Linux kernel, OpenStack, and more to create a a fully integrated cloud platform that is optimized for edge and IoT use cases.

The project was launched in 2018 and since then the community has put out 5 releases. StarlingX 5.0 was released in June 2021. This version of the platform included new features in areas such as security and hardware acceleration as well as some new functionality that was targeting factory automation.

Security related features included integrating Vault into the platform for secret management to provide the ability to store and access secrets securely. These secrets can include credentials, encryption keys, API tokens and other data that should not be stored in plain text on a system. This new component improves the platform’s security posture and encryption capabilities while maintaining manageability. Beyond this the community also made improvements to certification management to enhance automation in this area.

Hardware acceleration is becoming an enabler for various edge computing use cases and is in focus for StarlingX as well. The community added support for Nvidia GPUs, enabling operators to do additional offload for workloads that require GPU power, such as machine learning or other image-based processing applications.

Another key enhancement in this area was to add the ability to orchestrate FPGA image updates that provides the option to deploy FPGA with orchestrations that are automated from end to end.

In the 5.0 release the StarlingX community introduced a new feature called ‘edgeworker’ node, that is a new personality distinguished from 'worker' nodes. 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 to provide the possibility to manage industrial PCs and devices and sensors in these environments from StarlingX.

Beyond the above, the release also contained features and enhancements like:

• Improvements to certification management to enhance automation
• Precision Time Protocol (PTP) Notification Framework
• Containerized Ceph storage by using Rook
• Support for Net-SNMP v3 for the fault management service
• CephFS for cluster storage
• Container Image Signature Validation

During 2021 the community also started working on to enable using Debian as the base operating system for the plaform. Along with that change the build system is also getting improved. As these changes do not fit into one release cycle they will become available incrementally in later releases.

The community held two election cycles in 2021 to give opportunities for new leaders to arise. Both the Technical Steering Committee seats and Project and Technical Lead positions were up for re-election over the course of the year to extend and refresh the whole leadership of the project.

The community was participating in industry events to spread the word about the progress the contributors are making as well as to provide the opportunity for the contributors and new comers to come together and discuss project related matters, such as design, development and testing related topics. There were presentations about the project at virtual events such as the Open Infrastructure Summit, OpenInfra Live and Edge Computing World and contributors discussed technical details about the project at the two Project Teams Gathering (PTG) events.

The project had 3,150 changes committed by 148 authors from 5 organizations during the year.

2021 increased the commercial adoption of StarlingX. Besides T-Systems and Verizon, Vodafone is now deploying StarlingX as part of their infrastructure to utilize the platform's capabilities to power their ORAN rollout, which is the first official ORAN deployment in Europe.

The StarlingX code is hosted on Github under the Apache 2 license. Learn about the project, how to contribute and support the community at starlingx.io. Join these channels to get involved:

• Code: opendev.org/starlingx
• IRC: #starlingx on OFTC
• Mailing lists: lists.starlingx.io
• Website: starlingx.io

Zuul is an open source CI/CD platform designed for test-driven open source projects and software development organizations who need to gate against multiple projects and systems before landing a single patch. Since 2012, Zuul has been proven at scale as a critical part of the OpenStack development process. In 2018, Zuul version 3.0 was released with the intention of making Zuul easier to use outside of the OpenStack project. Since then we've seen the number of users and use cases grow tremendously. You will find Zuul behind cloud, e-commerce, and automotive software ensuring that every commit passes tests and is ready to be merged.

2021 was a big year for Zuul, in large part due to the efforts to remove all single points of failure from its component services. The goal is to allow you to run a highly available Zuul cluster that requires no downtime to perform maintenance. We have called this effort "Zuul v5" naming it after the release version that will include this functionality.

The first step towards version 5.0.0 was version 4.0.0 released in February 2021. Version 4.0.0 makes two assertions about the databases that Zuul communicates to. First that the SQL database is always present, and second that the ZooKeeper database communication is always encrypted. These two changes serve as the foundation for the incremental updates necessary to reach version 5.0.0. Importantly, Zuul components rely on these two databases (which themselves can be operated in an HA manner) to store necessary information allowing every Zuul component to run with redundant processes. The encrypted ZooKeeper connectivity is important because Zuul secrets and other sensitive information are stored in the ZooKeeper database which is necessary to run multiple Zuul Scheduler instances.

Seventeen additional version 4.x releases have been made in 2021 ending with 4.11.0. Many of these releases included incremental improvements on the road to version 5.0.0. If you are running 4.11.0 configuration data, secrets, merge requests, build requests, pipeline queues and more are now stored in the ZooKeeper database. This means that adventurous users can now run a fully HA Zuul deployment with no single points of failure on Zuul 4.11.0. However, we have not released version 5.0.0 yet as there are still old components specific to the previous design that need to be removed as well as documentation updates.

This step-wise development approach to the 5.0.0 release has worked well. The branched rewrite for version 3.0.0 was necessary at the time, but was very disruptive for users and made upgrades much harder, a result we were looking to avoid this time around. One major upside to the new approach is that deployments like OpenDev's have been able to more effectively run pre release Zuul updates and provide early feedback. Through Zuul's cooperation with OpenDev we have been able to do this and ensure that each release you consume is ready for use after non trivial real world trials. These same trials ensure that the incremental changes towards version 5.0.0 will all be ready when you upgrade to version 5.0.0 too.

These eighteen releases have brought more than just background operations specific updates; there are new features and bug fixes too. Version 4.6.0 brought a number of important security updates to Zuul that users should be aware of and plan upgrades for if they haven't already. Administrative tasks can be performed through Zuul's REST API using JWT tokens. When version 5.0.0 is released this will be required for administrative tasks as Gearman will be removed. Windows test node support has been greatly improved and is now quite useable. The Zuul Kubernetes operator has migrated to the KOPF operator platform. The addition of liveness/readiness probes and Prometheus support make running Zuul in Kubernetes easier.

A number of improvements have been made to Nodepool as well. The Azure driver has been rewritten using the new generic driver framework, making it more efficient and adding new features. A metastatic driver was added which allows Nodepool and Zuul to treat dynamic test instances as static nodes, timing them out after periods of inactivity.

To make all of this happen more than 80 contributors submitted changes to 14 project repositories. More than 1000 changes in total were merged to Zuul and its related repositories in 2021. The Zuul project would like to thank all of its contributors for a productive 2021.

The Zuul community saw some interesting changes and events during 2021 as well. Notably, the Zuul synchronous communications platform transitioned from IRC to Matrix. This brings a more modern web experience to chat for Zuul and should be familiar to more people. Matrix is a fully open source platform that stores channel history on the server side which means new participants in Zuul chat can review the entire history of the Matrix room in their client without needing to maintain a persistent connection. Community members also presented at events like Ansiblefest (requires registration), OpenInfra Live, and OpenInfra Live Keynotes whose recordings you can use to learn more about Zuul. Another great starting point is Zuul's new "Get Started" page which includes information about running your own Zuul, finding support, or purchasing a managed Zuul service.

Looking ahead to 2022 we expect version 5.0.0 to be available early in the year. Deployments with additional redundant components can expect better uptime and less painful upgrades. The Zuul documentation is being reorganized to be easier to navigate and include complete information on topics within a single page. IBM cloud support for Nodepool is also in the works. Once version 5.0.0 is finalized, I'm sure we will find a number of exciting new features to focus on as well.

Find us:

• On the mailing list: [email protected]
• On Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#zuul:opendev.org
• Code: opendev.org/zuul
• Code reviews on review.opendev.org
• Website: zuul-ci.org

OpenDev believes that free software needs free tools. OpenDev is a collaboratory for open source software development at a huge scale. Its focus is on code review, continuous integration, and project hosting provided exclusively through open source solutions like Git, Gerrit, Zuul, and Gitea.

2021 has been a year of streamlining and improved sustainability for OpenDev. We have converted additional services to our modern configuration management systems including Mailman, Refstack, Kerberos, OpenAFS, and our IRC bots.

A number of services like Mailman, Gerrit, Zuul, and Nodepool have received operating system upgrades on their underlying host systems. This will help ensure we can continue to run these services well into the future. We have also continued to improve our "testing like production" CI and CD systems for our services. This enables us to confidently upgrade services like Gerrit, Gitea, Etherpad, Zuul, and more with minimal effort when new versions are released. We bump versions in our Dockerfiles then rely on testing to tell us if everything will deploy to production and run correctly.

Finally, we've also started to shutdown long running services that no longer receive the necessary attention to continue running in OpenDev. The OpenStackID service has shifted over to being run by the Open Infrastructure Foundation (Now renamed OpenInfraID), and the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana services for CI job results are being taken over by OpenStack project contributors within the Testing and Collaboration Tools SIG.

The year had its challenges. The Freenode IRC network which OpenDev relied upon for synchronous communications experienced an ownership change, and subsequent fallout made the platform untenable for our users. The OpenDev team was already maintaining a backup set of channels on the OFTC IRC network. Once our users made the decision to switch networks we quickly mirrored remaining channels, moving bots and copying access control lists to the new network. This necessitated a conversion of our meetbot from the supybot platform to limnoria. A number of our homegrown bots also needed updates to handle different authentication procedures with OFTC. The Covid 19 pandemic continues to create challenges for travel and in person events. The OpenDev team supported the Foundation's 2021 virtual PTG events via our Jitsi Meet based Meetpad service for video conferencing and scheduling via the IRC PTGbot and Ethercalc.

2021 brought new and improved tooling to our users. The Zuul project converted to the open source Matrix platform for communications. The OpenDev team is managing an Element Matrix Services Matrix instance for OpenDev communities now. Matrix rooms hosted on OpenDev's homeserver can make use of our logging and Gerrit bots, but there is no meeting functionality yet. Bindep and git-review saw three new releases. The git-review updates are important as they bring better support for newer Git. A new release of the Gear library was made to accommodate changes to OpenSSL as well.

On the CI front we've made a number of exciting updates. Zuul's Scheduler is no longer a single point of failure in our installation, as OpenDev is continuously deploying the latest Zuul updates and running active-active Zuul Schedulers. In the future this should ensure that Zuul downtimes are rare, and users will no longer need to experience re-enqueued jobs when we perform upgrades. We have added support for CentOS Stream images (both releases 8 and 9), Debian Bullseye, and Euler Linux in our CI system. Users should note that CentOS 8 has reached its End of Life and users should migrate to Stream or some other platform. We updated the default CI image from Ubuntu Bionic Beaver to Ubuntu Focal Fossa. OpenDev added a second set of ARM64 test resources donated by Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. This means we now have redundant ARM64 test clouds with additional capacity. These resources help test and build packages for OpenStack, Python Cryptography, and more.

Our users had a busy year. 43,874 changes pushed by 1,549 committers were merged on OpenDev in 2021. These changes received 372,084 reviews made by 1,713 reviewers across 966 active project repos. Our users communicate well too. The mailing lists hosted by OpenDev received 9,854 posts from 868 senders. The chat platforms we moderate received 601,175 messages from 2,469 participants.

OpenDev continues to be a community effort. The success of this endeavor relies upon all the people who collaborate to help us out. We would like to thank everyone who made this possible throughout 2021, and welcome those who want to assist in 2022!

Find us:

• On the mailing list: [email protected]
• On IRC: #opendev on OFTC
• Code: opendev.org/opendev
• Website: opendev.org

OpenInfra Community & Mentoring Programs

OpenInfra User Groups

Helena Spease, Marketing & Community Associate, OpenInfra Foundation

In 2021, we saw 951 new members join various User Groups across the globe. The Indonesia OpenStack User Group experienced the largest growth with 277 new members in 2021.

Amidst challenging circumstances, User Groups showed their commitment to the community by organizing a total of 21 meetups across 9 different groups this past year that reached hundreds in their respective communities. While many User Groups remained virtual, the OpenInfra Lower Saxony User Group and OpenInfra User Group Sweden were able to host a few in-person events. Overall, 2021 saw a mix of virtual, hybrid, and in-person events. The OpenStack and Open Infrastructure Korea User Group even held an event on YouTube Live to close out the year.

Outreachy Program

Samuel de Medeiros Queiroz, Outreachy Program Coordinator

Five interns were funded through the Outreachy Program to support the OpenStack project and global community.

• Sunday Mgbogu from Nigeria who added support for OpenStack resources reconciliation in Kuryr-Kubernetes
• Kafilat Adeleke from Nigeria who added support for share types quotas
• cenne.d who exposed boot mode and secure boot status in the Ironic API
• Archana Kumari from India who contributed to OpenStackSDK support for Manila
• Mahnoor A. from Pakistan who worked on auto-Documenting REST API classes for Ironic

Mentorship at Boston University

Throughout 2021, the relationship between the OpenStack community and Boston University continued to grow through the continued mentorship of three students in the Senior Design course and, in the following semester, in the Fundamentals of Cloud Computing course for undergraduates at Boston University. Both groups of students worked on the OpenStackClient and the OpenStackSDK.

The Senior Design students worked with the Manila team to get the OpenStackClient closer to parity with the python-manilaclient. The Senior Design Students were Ashley Rodriguez, Mark Tony, and Nicole Chen. Following her completion of the course, Ashley went on to be hired by one of our member companies- Red Hat- and is continuing her work on Manila and the OpenStackClient.

Students in the Fundamentals of cloud computing course focused on a different storage service- Cinder. They worked on implementing the functionality that the python-cinderclient has into the OpenStackClient. Soon, a new group of students from another university will pick up where they left off furthering the effort. Thanks to Thrivikram Mudunuri, Suneeth Ravi, Diwei Zhu, Ritvik Vinodkumar and Ujjval Sharma, we are making excellent progress towards parity.

Mentorship at North Dakota State University

From January through May the OpenStack community participated in North Dakota State University's Capstone course. The course focuses on giving students real world experience by working with industry folks on projects throughout the semester. In 2021, four students were mentored by a few members of the OpenStackSDK/OSC team (Stephen Finucane, Artem Goncharov, and Kendall Nelson) to work on the Cinder implementation in the OpenStackSDK.

• Hudson Dahly
• James Palmer
• Alex Wilcox
• Dylan Zapzalka

Between the four students they pushed a total of 19 patches to the OpenStackSDK and made a lot of progress towards parity with the python-cinderclient. Once the cinder APIs are implemented in the OpenStackSDK, and then the OpenStackClient is extended to include them, the cinderclient can then be deprecated.

In preparation for the next run of the course, both OpenStack and Kata Containers submitted projects for students to chose from and in early 2022, both projects will begin mentoring students for the semester. This will be the first time that Kata is participating in such a program.

Mentorship at Oregon State University

In 2021 our relationship with Oregon State University continued to flourish The OpenInfra Foundation continues to fund this program to increase the active contributor base, so thanks to the Foundation members who make this possible! We had one student for most of the year, Ryan Zimmerman, working upstream in the OpenStack community. He spent all of his time on reaching parity between the OpenStackSDK and the python-novaclient and succeeded. With his efforts, the groundwork has been laid to now finish the migration from the project specific client to the OpenStackClient. This is part of community wide efforts to migrate all the project specific clients' functionalities to the OpenStackClient simplifying the user experience.

In December, two new students began picking up where Ryan Zimmerman left off. Violet Kurtz and Ryan Persson began onboarding shortly before the end of their school semester. They are now working on using the nova specific APIs implemented in the OpenStackSDK to achieve parity between the python-novaclient with the OpenStackClient. Once they complete the Nova work, they will focus their efforts on doing the same with Cinder.

OpenStack Upstream Institute

The training was held twice throughout the year. The first training took place as part of the Open Source Day stand alone event held by the Anita B Foundation who also hosts the Grace Hopper Celebration. The ratio of mentors to students was very high (2:1) which yielded not only a productive day full of good discussions, but a highly specialized experience for the attendees that participated in the event. Upstream Institute was held in a one-day format where the mentors focused on sharing information about the OpenStack community including the tools and processes that contributors use on a daily basis.

The afternoon section of the training concentrated on hands-on experience where students worked on reproducing and fixing bugs in the OpenStack code base. Attendees who were able to stay for the afternoon learned how to push a code change upstream for review and several of them were able to go above and beyond. They were able to reproduce their bugs and also submit a fix to it. The training was very sucessful and we got great feedback and engagement from students.

The second training held in 2021 was also an online training that was held as part of the Open Source Day within the Grace Hopper Celebration in October. Similar to the first rendition, the training was held in one-day format with lectures in the morning and hands-on exercises in the afternoon. Again, the students worked on fixing real bugs and the more than 14 mentors made sure that attendees learned the mechanics of uploading a change for review, which is essential to be able to contribute code or documentation after the course. Four attendees pushed patches for bugs that were real fixes to OpenStack and as a result, they entered into a drawing that Grace Hopper was hosting to incentivize working on open source.

While the possibilities to hold the training were again, very limited in 2021, a group of mentors keep maintaining the course material to ensure it is up to date for every training occasion to provide the best experience to the students who joined. The content, being fully open source and available online, provides the possibility for individuals and organizations to go through it as a self-paced course or run it locally.

OpenInfra Events

OpenInfra Live

Going into the second year of pandemic related travel restrictions and in-person event cancellations, 2021 presented a unique set of challenges to our ongoing efforts to gather and connect as a community. Instead of trying again to recreate the annual in-person Summit virtually in 2021, the Foundation decided to pivot and focus on the good parts of virtual events (engagement, interactivity, and global reach) while trying to steer away from the challenges (difficult to focus on a screen for long periods of time, inability to ask questions, lack of personal interaction).

We introduced OpenInfra Live in March of 2021, a weekly interactive series covering all things OpenInfra, streaming to YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn every Thursday, as well as being posted to WeChat. To date, we’ve produced over 30 episodes, with an average of 100 live viewers that grows to 1,500 views within the first month of streaming. Over the course of the year, we accumulated over 75,000 views across all episodes of the show, and plan to continue the program in 2021.

Topics of the weekly episodes included:

• Explosive Growth of OpenStack Deployments: The 2021 User Survey showed that the footprint of OpenStack clouds grew by 66% over the last year, totaling over 25 million cores in production. During this episode, operators from Kakao, LINE, Schwarz IT, NeCTAR and T-Systems discuss what’s causing this OpenStack growth at their organization
• The Role of Open Source in Digital Sovereignty: Johan Christenson, CEO of CityNetwork, hosted a discussion around the role of open source in digital sovereignty between Pierre Gronlier, CTO of Gaia-X, Kurt Garloff, CTO at Sovereign Cloud Stack, and Linda Siwe, chief commercial officer at Binero. The Future of Network Depends on Open Infrastructure: Martin Casado, Bruce Davie and Amar Padmanabhan joined Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier to discuss the opportunities around connecting the globe, including leveraging open source technologies like Magma, software-based RAN and OpenStack.
• Large Scale OpenStack series: Over the course of the year, we developed a series of episodes featuring members of the Large Scale SIG discussing issues faced by operators running OpenStack at scale. As an example, in July operators of OpenStack-based large scale clouds (including InMotion Hosting, CERN, NECTAR research cloud, Verizon Media, City Network and Open Telekom Cloud) joined to discuss how they manage spare capacity.

With the help of Foundation members 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 a broad global reach despite the continued challenges of the year.

All episodes of OpenInfra Live from 2021 are available on YouTube.

OpenInfra Live: Keynotes

On November 17th and 18th, the Foundation hosted its first two-day virtual event featuring presentations by more than 30 leaders from the global OpenInfra community streaming live on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook. Both days of Keynotes were also streamed to SegmentFault, a China-focused platform. Keynote topics covered a broad range of OpenInfra use cases, and projects like OpenStack and Kubernetes took center stage.

The OpenInfra Live Keynotes event featured:

• Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier discussed LOKI stack—Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure—highlighting the trend of organizations integrating three of the top four most active open source projects together in production.
• Balaji Srinivasan (Entrepreneur, Crypto Expert, Former Partner at a16z and CTO of Coinbase) talked about the need to decentralize at the infrastructure layer, which removes the “trust factor” requirement of the operator because the entire backend is not only open source, but also open state and open execution.
• Sarah Novotny (Director of Open Source Strategy & Ecosystem, Microsoft) detailed the key patterns for success when companies engage in open source communities, as well as trends we should watch for over the next decade of open source.
• Thierry Carrez (VP of Engineering, OpenInfra Foundation) provided updates on the state of open infrastructure and how the Foundation’s scope expanded to getting infrastructure powered by open source software everywhere. Other Day Two speakers included: Martin Casado (Partner, Andreessen Horowitz) joined to discuss the cost of cloud and how it is impacting the economics of cloud-native companies.
• Haoyang Li (OpenInfra Foundation) provided an update on what the open infrastructure landscape looks like in China. Representatives from each of the OpenInfra projects joined to discuss current happenings in each of their Communities

A huge thank you to our Headline sponsors Red Hat and Wind River, and our Supporting sponsors, Cloud & Heat, Component Soft, Coredge, InMotion Hosting, iVolve and Vexxhost.

You can check out all of the OpenInfra Live Keynote segments on this YouTube playlist.

Project Teams Gathering (PTG)

After the success of the first virtual PTGs in 2020, we decided to continue that format into the 2021 PTGs since the potential to host in-person events was still questionable.

Both the April and October 2021 PTG welcomed over 500 registered attendees from 46 countries. The April PTG hosted 47 project teams, and the October PTG had 49 teams participate, including two new OpenStack projects, Venus and Skyline. The teams met throughout the week in 2-4 hour increments at times that worked best for their team members.

The PTGbot was a successful scheduling tool once again, helping participants and teams keep track of discussions and virtual meeting locations.

Many teams publish a recap of their PTG discussions and future technical plans. You can check out some of those recaps here:

• Kata Containers
• StarlingX

OpenInfra Days & Cloud Operator Days

OpenInfra Days are one or two day regional events 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.

Several communities hosted both virtual and in-person events this year, spanning across the globe, including two first-time events:

• OpenInfra Days DR Congo
• OpenInfra Days Asia

OpenInfra Days Asia was a combined effort from User Groups in multiple regions, championed by OpenInfra Foundation board member, Rico Lin.

Other events include:

• OpenInfra Days Indonesia
• OpenInfra Days China
• OpenInfra Community Days Korea
• Cloud Operator Day Tokyo

In a unique approach, the second annual Cloud Operator Days took place throughout the month of August with on demand sessions online, leading up to a two day live online event, complete with keynotes, that gathered 2,000 attendees to discuss challenges of operating cloud infrastructure.

The OpenInfra Foundation supported and sponsored each of these events. Overall, the events drew over 100,000 attendees virtually.

OpenInfra Special Interest Groups (SIGs) & Working Groups

Large Scale SIG

The Large Scale SIG is an OpenStack special interest group gathering operators of large scale OpenStack deployments interested in sharing their experience and discussing best practices. The group has been meeting regularly this year, with about 6 people forming the core group and a dozen of other people more infrequently involved.

One output of the group is the Scaling Journey: a set of wiki pages that describe the various stages of scaling your OpenStack deployments from tens of nodes or tens of thousands of nodes. That path was traveled by a lot of operators before, but lack of documentation and practical experience sharing still makes it a daunting prospect. The goal of the SIG is to document frequently asked questions and answers, as well as point to relevant resources, to make that journey as predictable and pleasant as possible.

Another focus of the Large Scale SIG this year was the “Large Scale OpenStack” show, a recurring event on the OpenInfra Live webcast. We invited operators of large scale deployments and got them to present how they solve a given operations challenge, and discuss live between themselves their different approaches. We tackled topics like upgrades in large scale environments, spare capacity handling, software-defined supercomputers, scaling Neutron, as well as operators tricks and tools. This show was amongst the most popular episodes on OpenInfra Live, and our goal is to continue in 2022.

Scientific SIG

The Scientific SIG continues to be co-chaired by Martial Michel (DataMachines), Stig Telfer (StackHPC) and Blair Bethwaite (NeSI). Membership of the SIG is growing, with 136 members joined to a Slack workspace (os-scientific-sig.slack.com).

In 2021, SIG members have participated (virtually) in the Project Teams Gathering. A highlight has been the recording of lightning talks given by SIG members at the PTG sessions. Twelve lightning talks from two PTG sessions have been uploaded to the OpenInfra Foundation's YouTube channel.

However, SIG community participation could improve, with minimal use of the openstack-discuss mailing list and only occasional use of the scheduled IRC meetings.

Bare Metal SIG

During 2021, the Bare Metal Special Interest Group focused on outreach and information sharing. We had a number of contributors present features in Ironic and their use cases which drove those specific features to be developed. A number of these monthly presentations were recorded and shared on Youtube. The SIG also utilized sessions to provide input into the next development cycles prior to the development community meeting to plan and discuss the work ahead. Perhaps the most powerful lesson that we learned this year is that we needed to actively reach out and spread the word of the SIG. Visibility is sometimes difficult to gain upfront, and ultimately the power in the SIG is in getting contributors and operators to meet and discuss. It takes everyone broadcasting outwards to make this happen, but the outcomes can be magical.

Diversity & Inclusion Working Group

The Diversity and Inclusion Working Group continued reaching out to the OIF projects and inviting them to join our efforts and expand beyond the OpenStack project. To date we have been most successful in this effort during the virtual PTGs and hope a return to in person events will help these efforts.

After approval and the move to the new OpenInfra site, the Divisive Language stance was added to the Wiki and linked to the word list already created. We have reached out over the year and invited all projects to join meetings or PTG sessions for help on this initiative. As part of this work, the WG audited the Foundation's governance and By-Laws and made recommendations to update outdated language.

The D&I WG also helped to lead OpenStack's presence during Grace Hopper's Open Source Days. This year there was a standalone event in addition to the event held with the main conference and we had approximately 12-14 mentors aiding attendees during these events.

In addition, several of the questions developed by the WG for our own Diversity and Inclusion WG were included in the Linux Foundation's DEI survey.

In 2022, we plan on continuing to aid the OIF projects in their efforts to remove divisive language and to use more inclusive words. We also hope to be able to resume efforts with the community during virtual and in person events.

Interop Working Group

The OpenInfra Interop Working Group has been issuing guidelines for OpenStack Logos and Branding programs as part of Marketplace development every release. The programs which can be issued currently are as follows:

Core programs

• OpenStack Powered Platform
• OpenStack Powered Compute
• OpenStack Powered Object Storage

Add-on programs

• OpenStack Powered DNS
• OpenStack Powered Orchestration
• OpenStack Powered Shared File System

Last year we merged Interop and refstack into a single WG and transitioned sources to opendev. We released only one new guideline instead of 2 (1 per each development cycle as was done before) due to a lot of work we had to invest into the IWG group reformation, tooling and documentation updates. The new guideline was formed in November, hence the name 2021.11. It contains the most new test and capability additions out of the guidelines released within a few last years.

Marketplace page is now capable of showing add-on logos as some vendors have started testing against these add-on programs and their marketplace entries reflect it. The interop working group guidelines will not be validating API micro-versions. In order to increase transparency, we plan on publishing the micro versions tested against guidelines, in the Marketplace reports.

During the year 2021 we received feedback about the program naming from vendors and users. It has been brought to our attention that dividing the programs to core ones and add-on ones suggests a certain inequality which is not the case. Another issue with the current program definition is that the OpenStack Platform logo program requires Cinder service to be enabled in the tested cloud, however, the service is not required and a functioning OpenStack compute cloud doesn’t need to have one.

In the 2022 we want to focus on adding a new program for octavia service. Also, we want to address the raised concerns about program naming conventions. We plan to brainstorm and discuss possible solutions which would clear the naming confusion without any significant changes of the conditions for getting our current logos.

For more technical update see also our Superuser article.

Marketing Performance

Media Relations and Analyst Relations

Public relations efforts are led by a distributed team of professionals in the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific. This team engaged analysts and journalists worldwide in dialogue, proactively delivering news, commentary, and contributed byline content for both the Foundation and for its individual projects. Community news highlights are available at https://openinfra.dev/press/.

Media Relations

Virtual press conferences were held in April and October to brief journalists on the evolution of the Foundation, the status of individual projects supported by the OpenInfra community, and efforts to collaborate without boundaries. In addition, the PR team conducted proactive outreach for these key events and initiatives: 

• OpenInfra Foundation seats first Board of Directors 
• OpenInfra Foundation 2021 event agenda
• Red Hat support of Open Research Cloud Initiative/OpenInfra Labs
• OpenInfra Foundation Associate Memberships
• Microsoft Platinum Membership
• OpenInfra Live: Keynotes and OpenInfra Summit Berlin 2022
• Taibai
• Nipa Cloud Gold Membership
• Growth of OpenInfra software adoption
• Project software releases: 
• • OpenStack Wallaby and Xena releases
  • Airship 2.0
  • StarlingX 5.0

Analysis shows that Open Infrastructure Foundation news coverage comprised more than 26,699 total placements in 2021. Media coverage was distributed globally (41% APAC, 49% North America, 10% Europe, by volume).

Analyst Relations

In 2021, the Open Infrastructure Foundation continued the virtual analyst briefing format that had been established in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the course of the year, Foundation staff leadership conducted both group and individual briefing sessions, providing updates to more than 21 analysts in Asia, North America, and Europe. Firms with strong ongoing interest in our community’s work include 451 Research, ARC Advisory Group, AvidThink, Constellation Research, IDC, Forrester, Gartner, Omdia, Redmonk and others.

Analyst interest in the community’s work has shifted steadily since the early days of the Foundation. While early coverage necessarily focused on the OpenStack project, the focus has broadened substantially to include other projects supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Additionally, coverage has shifted to include Open Infrastructure Foundation projects as components of broad-based solutions that leverage open infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes.

CHANNEL PERFORMANCE

Open Infrastructure Newsletter

The Open Infrastructure Community Newsletter regularly shares the latest developments and activities across open infrastructure projects, events, and users supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. The newsletters are sent out to the community in English through email.

In 2021, 11 newsletters were distributed to the open infrastructure community. There have been more than 46,000 people who have opened at least one newsletter for the past year and more than 74,000 unique views on all the newsletters.

Looking forward to 2022, we will continue to deliver the most updated quality content to the open infrastructure community and create awareness among the broader audience in the community. Check out past newsletters, subscribe to the newsletter, and if you would like to contribute content, please email [email protected].

The Open Infrastructure Foundation continued to support the popular Superuser publication, covering the open infrastructure ecosystem news, case studies, event recaps, product updates and announcements, project release and more. In 2021, Superuser has reached more than 106,000 unique visitors from 193 countries. Editors and contributors are members of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, the OpenStack, and adjacent open source communities.

Social Media Channels

OpenInfra Foundation and its projects’ social media channels cover Foundation and projects updates, events updates, ecosystem companies-related announcements, and thought leadership pieces from the open infrastructure community, featuring all the projects that are governed by the Foundation or other communities.

In 2021, the Foundation has reached over 468,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn with over 35,000 engagements in total. The Foundation is also running multiple WeChat accounts and groups that cover various topics including OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX, multi-arch SIG, and more, that are specifically tailored to the OpenInfra community in China.

The Foundation also has a large audience on its YouTube channel. With the weekly OpenInfra Live episodes and OpenInfra Live: Keynotes airing on YouTube, we have received 426,230 views, 40,200 watch hours, and an increase of 2,600 subscribers in 2021.