Replicating Success by Applying the Power of the OpenInfra Community

Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director, OpenInfra Foundation

I recently saw these two headlines nearly adjacent to each other on an open source news feed: 

Does open source software have a future?

Open source is more important than ever.

I found this both amusing and gratifying, because the second headline is the clear and resounding answer to the first. My admittedly biased opinion has been validated by the findings of numerous surveys and analyst reports this year, for example:

• The 2022 State of Open Source Report, issued by OpenLogic by Perforce and the Open Source Initiative in February, reported that 77% of respondents increased the use of open source software in their organizations over the last 12 months, and 36.5% indicated that they increased the use significantly.
• Also in February “The State of Enterprise Open Source: A Red Hat Report” documented that 95% of respondents to its survey said that enterprise open source is important to their organization's overall enterprise infrastructure and that 82% of IT leaders are more likely to select a vendor who contributes to the open source community. 
• In March, a survey conducted by Ashnik indicated “about 82% of organizations today rely on open source to 'drive innovation' within the organization; 100% voted 'ease of adoption' as the best feature of open-source. Over 95% of respondents cited that open source offers 'higher security' over proprietary software.”
• In September, the TODO Group issued findings from its Open Source Program Management Survey, which revealed that the adoption of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) or similar programs has risen to 50% of respondents, the highest level in five years.
• And our very own OpenStack User Survey, published in November, documented more than 40 million cores of OpenStack compute in production, which is a 60% increase compared to 2021 and a 166% increase since 2020.
• Al Gillen, group VP, Software Development and Open Source at IDC, acknowledges in the firm’s “Market Analysis Perspective, Worldwide Open source Ecosystem, 2022” report issued in November, "As the industry transitions out of the pandemic years, the use of open source software continues unabated…”, despite security concerns regarding open source software supply chains. 

Open source is, indeed, more important than ever.

And I would take that one step further: Open infrastructure is more important than ever.

Mark Collier, our COO, painted an exciting picture during his Summit keynote address (delivered live, in-person, in Berlin!) of how rapidly IT is advancing and therefore how critical it is for us all to work together to build the infrastructure our world needs. 

Meeting that need is why 60 organizations joined together two years ago to support the relaunch of the OpenStack Foundation as a new Open Infrastructure Foundation with a broader mission and scope of building open source communities who write infrastructure software that runs in production. Since then, membership of sponsoring organizations at all levels has grown by more than 33%, and Silver Members now exceed 50. Ant Group, Bloomberg, Meta, Microsoft, Nipa Cloud, Vexxhost and Wind River have joined as OpenInfra Platinum or Gold Members within the last 18 months. The expanded mission has also enabled the OpenInfra Foundation to tap into new regions, garnering increased support from organizations in Africa and Southeast Asia.

These organizations recognize the value of the OpenInfra model and know the global OpenInfra community excels in delivering open source infrastructure software that runs in production, as evidenced by the success of projects such as OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul. 

Earlier this year, we announced a way for these sponsoring organizations to invest directly in the projects they care most about. The OpenInfra Foundation’s Directed Funding approach offers project communities the opportunity to tap into:

• A global network of 110,000 individuals, 182 countries and 700+ organizations;
• A customizable approach to building successful, sustainable open infrastructure projects, based on The Four Opens and with services delivered by the OpenInfra Foundation staff;
• A legal, project-specific funding entity with a project fund governing board, comprising at least one OpenInfra Foundation Platinum Member sponsor joined by multiple funding partners. This entity is created in an efficient way, but is flexible enough to be modified based on the needs of the project community.

This approach to project hosting is all about replicating success by applying the power of the OpenInfra Community—one of the most productive groups of collaborative individuals and organizations on the planet. Thank you for all you do. You are amazing.

Did you know that if you count our years together as the OpenStack Foundation, the OpenInfra Foundation celebrated its 10th anniversary this year? Ten years in, I’m happy to say that our mission is more relevant than ever, our community is more committed than ever, and the future for open infrastructure is brighter than ever. Working together, the decade to come will be our most impactful yet. 

State of OpenInfra: Introducing Project Funds

Thierry Carrez, General Manager, OpenInfra Foundation

So the world needs more open source solutions for providing infrastructure. More OpenInfra. We need to make those solutions featureful yet easy to operate, while ensuring they work well together. How do we rise to this challenge? How do we bring that vision to life?

In a word: together.

Our long-held belief is that successful and long-lasting open source projects require developing and balancing three forces: developers, users, and ecosystem.

Developers and other direct contributors to the open source projects produce the software that makes it all happen. They are the core of the community, and without them, nothing gets done. As a Foundation, we support them by running Project Teams Gathering events to allow them to meet in a productive setting, and by providing resources to support key functions like community management, project infrastructure, contributor onboarding, release management or vulnerability management.

But good code is not enough. Good code is worth nothing if it’s not used in production to solve real problems. We need users, and we need them engaged in our community, sharing their experiences and providing feedback to the developers. As a Foundation, we support users by running specific Forum sessions at our OpenInfra Summits, as well as leading initiatives like the OpenStack Large Scale SIG where our largest users come together to share their experience running some of the largest infrastructure deployments in the world. We also support and engage in community and industry events around the world, spreading the word about open infrastructure and our projects.

In order to have successful and sustainable developer and user forces, we need a third one: the ecosystem force. A thriving ecosystem ensures that contributors can get employed, and that users can find products, solutions and support to help them. As a Foundation, we support the ecosystem by building strong brands around our projects, defending the trademarks, and encouraging interoperability. We help give ecosystem products and solutions the exposure they need in a very crowded space, through the marketplace at our Summits and on our project websites, our social media properties and our publications.

Together, developers, users and ecosystem forces ensure the success and the long-term sustainability of our projects. This is the model we want to follow to enable more OpenInfra in the future. Our new Project Fund offering enables our OpenInfra ecosystem to coalesce around funding specific new initiatives, in a targeted, transparent, and cost-efficient manner. Tackling the next decade of Open Infrastructure, together.

So this is a call to action. The world is encountering crazy challenges today, and at the same time it seems to retract behind boundaries and want to collaborate less. But rising to those crazy challenges requires sharing more, requires wasting less energy reinventing separate wheels. And infrastructure is a great area to all openly collaborate on. So let’s collaborate and build more open source solutions for providing infrastructure, without boundaries. Let’s do more OpenInfra. Together.

Note from the Chair of the OpenInfra Foundation Board of Directors

Julia Kreger, Board Chair

The year of 2022 can only be described as a resumption of something that seemed normal, while we adjust to the strange new union of precaution and practicality which is now necessary. For many around the world, the uncertainty of the pandemic which has gripped the world for the past few years has largely drifted away. We have been able to meet with our friends and family without as much fear or angst as we had in prior years. The experience has changed us, for this is now “the new normal” as some call it. The last few years taught us much about ourselves. How to work together while largely disconnected. We learned what worked, what didn’t work, and ultimately the power of community.

With the return of in-person events, this past summer we had an amazing return of the Open Infrastructure Summit in Berlin, Germany. We were able to share a mutual vision, and worked to find the same words of meaning, so we can have a shared basis for the vision of what the next decade of Open Infrastructure will be!

This year was a year of reconnection, re-engagement, and preparation for the next steps. In this we have grown our corporate memberships by nearly 30%, and now have 21 associate members in the form of Universities and Industry associations. We laid the groundwork for directed project funds projects, and to improve our capabilities in this coming year. We’ve also worked to try and get into a habit of more regular communication with projects, to spread our context, but also learn their context as well.

After all, that is what living and working in a community is all about. Learning and sharing from each other to build a better tomorrow through tooling, capabilities, and knowledge. Doing this in our Open Source communities makes our communities stronger just as it makes us better individuals. It takes hard work, as do all good things, just as the past ten years of Open Infrastructure has, so too will the next ten years.

I look forward to the future we blaze forward together for Open Infrastructure!

It has been a pleasure and an honor to serve as the Chair of the Board during 2022. I am sincerely thankful for the time and thoughts shared by my fellow members of the Board. The foundation staffers who have worked to ensure this year's success. The project leaders who have taken time to share perspectives. The contributors who contribute. The participants who engage. The Universities which help teach the next generation, and the organizations who invest and help turn our work into everyday reality.

State of OpenInfra China

In 2022, the OpenInfra community in China has grown immensely. With numerous volunteers and a large base of Open Infrastructure organizations, China has remained the second largest OpenStack community in the world. 

OpenStack TC: Venus and Skyline Release

There were two new projects submitted, accepted and released by OpenStack TC:

• Venus project - provides a one-stop solution to log management services.
• Skyline project - a modern OpenStack dashboard optimized by UI and UE. 

The Venus project was initiated by Inspur Data, and contributed to the community. With development moving forward, more than three organizations, including StackHPC, China Telecom and Zhengzhou Yunhai Info Tech, have started contributing to the upstream project. This has helped release features like full text/multi-dimensional retrieval, typical error analysis, call chain analysis and many more.

The Skyline project was originally initiated and contributed by 99Cloud. Now there are more than four organizations participating in the upstream development and because of that, it was included in the OpenStack 26th release. 

Cyborg

In the past year, Cyborg continues to feature its development as well as a more diverse upstream community. In the last release, more than 25 organizations around the world participated in Cyborg upstream development, including a list of companies from China.

Kata Containers Growth in China

Kata Containers has made significant progress in 2022, especially in the China community. 

Two new user case studies were released by China Unicom and Inspur Data, which targeted mass deployment of Kata Containers. Ant Group’s Kata Container usage white paper was also released in 2022, gaining a lot of visibility globally and even won a Superuser Award. Over 300 developers are actively communicating with each other in the WeChat group and discussing technical issues and sharing their deployment.

Computing Force Network (CFN) Working Group

In 2022, a new CFN working group was founded, initially driven by China Mobile. The group is aiming to formulate solutions for common challenges using related technologies, promoting technical implementations and gradually building the next generation of open infrastructure. The working group has been widely recognized and had a total of 16 organizations join the taskforce in 2022. Currently the working group has its own subteams set up with weekly community meetings hosted on WeChat.

Regarding community communication, most of the news press, software updates, event sharing and user case studies were posted through WeChat public accounts.

OpenInfra Day China 

Although the pandemic prevented in-person events from being organized, the China community was still able to successfully deliver a virtual OpenInfra Days China, with over 20,000 attendees tuning in online. This year, OpenInfra Days China was again organized and delivered by SegmentFault, who has collaborated with our local volunteer team for many years. Additionally, this was also the first year that we collaborated with other major Chinese open source communities such as InfoQ, CSDN and Open Source China. A big thank you to our lovely China volunteer team for helping organize the event.

Introducing: OpenInfra Foundation Members

Thierry Carrez, General Manager, OpenInfra Foundation

The Associate membership program was created with two objectives: getting academic and research institutions (traditionally large users of open infrastructure) more directly involved in our communities, and creating a framework for close collaboration with partner non-profit organizations that promote the use of open source software to provide infrastructure.

Over the course of 2022 we grew this program from 11 members to 21 members. On the academic and research front, Indiana University (home for the NSF “Jetstream 2” initiative), the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, North Dakota State University, INRIA, Telecom Paris and Delhi University have joined us. On the non-profit side, the Open Source Initiative (the body that safeguards the Open Source Definition and maintains the list of approved Open Source licenses), the DMTF standards body, as well as the eMerging Open Tech Foundation became Associate members this year.

These memberships all reflect active collaborations between our Foundation and those institutions on sharing operational experience, marketing open infrastructure, defending open source, or teaching the next generation of OpenInfra talent.

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

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

The OpenInfra Foundation continues to see growth in worldwide organizations running and supporting open source communities who write software that runs in production. Among existing regions like the United States and Europe as well as growing regions including Africa and South America, members around the world are joining the OpenInfra Foundation to build the next decade of open infrastructure:

• Eleven new member organizations from seven separate countries, creating a 15% member growth for the Foundation
• Longtime OpenStack user, Bloomberg came on as a new Gold Member
• OpenStack-powered public cloud provider VEXXHOST upgraded to become a Gold Member
• Ten new Silver Members
• Nine Associate Members joined to support the mission of the OpenInfra Foundation
• Particular growth was seen in Europe, Africa, SE Asia and the United States
• Strategic growth areas emerged including OpenStack-powered public cloud, hybrid cloud, HPC, StarlingX, 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 2023 and beyond. If you would like to build the next decade of open infrastructure with us, let me know!

OpenInfra Project Updates

This has been another big year for OpenStack with another two on time releases: Yoga and Zed. It also marks reaching the end of the alphabet for the first time! A total of 26 releases of OpenStack are now in the books before we loop back around to ‘A’ in 2023!
Yoga: Yoga, the 25th release of OpenStack focused on a few key themes - advanced hardware features, improved integration with cloud-native software such as Kubernetes and Prometheus, and reducing technical debt to maintain a stable and reliable OpenStack core. Over 25 weeks, OpenStack contributors authored almost 13.5K changes. The 680 contributors represent more than 125 organizations and 44 countries continuing to keep OpenStack one of the most active open source projects in the world.

Zed: Zed was released in early October and was worked on by 710 contributors (more than the previous Yoga) across 140 different organizations. Zed again focused on hardware enablement, like the previous release, as new hardware continues to be an industry theme. Aside from hardware enablement, the Zed release also took an active approach to responding to user feedback in the addition of two new services - Venus and Skyline. 

In addition to releasing two new versions of OpenStack, the OpenStack Technical Committee (TC) made some changes to how the community collaborates, how users are supported and recognized the contributions of a community member. The two most significant resolutions the Technical Committee passed with regards to the development of OpenStack and how the community works together to build releases are the release cadence adjustment and the release identification process. Essentially, the TC has defined a method for users to upgrade once a year as opposed to every six months; for more details on this skip level upgrade release process, please read the full resolution. Also, the Technical Committee have permanently delegated the release naming process to the foundation in favor of using a numerical naming scheme for the developer community. This means that the ‘A’ release taking place in early 2023 will be ‘2023.1’ where development is concerned and have a codename that will be decided by the OpenInfra Foundation for marketing purposes. 

Lastly, the Zed release followed the passing of Ilya Etingof. Ilya was a prolific contributor to the Ironic project having worked on boot management, out-of-band hardware inspection and virtual media boot. In his memory, the Technical Committee dedicated the Zed release to Ilya.

More OpenStack in Production than Ever

Allison Price, Director of Marketing & Community, OpenInfra Foundation

In November 2021, the OpenStack community celebrated 25 million cores in production and just 12 months later, 40 million cores were recorded in the annual OpenStack User Survey, marking 166% growth compared to the 15 million core milestone in 2020. This growth was seen among organizations of all sizes, including seven organizations who were recording over 1 million cores in production.

This growth was also notably seen among OpenStack-powered public clouds, as the footprint grew to 300 data centers worldwide. Compared to 180 public data centers just two years ago, this growing footprint has been reported in new regions including Southeast Asia, South America and Africa. 

OpenStack Certified Administrator (COA) Exam

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

The Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam is the only professional certification offered by the OpenInfra Foundation. The OpenInfra Foundation would like to thank Mirantis for continuing to host the infrastructure for the COA exam. 

In 2022,

• COA exam vouchers were purchased by OpenInfra Members (Btech, 99Cloud and Nipa Cloud): 142
• Nine OpenInfra Members continue to offer COA training, including AWCloud, 99Cloud, ComponentSoft, Red Hat, AWCloud, WhiteStack, Cleura, Mirantis CDAC and Canonical 
• 209 students passed, an 8% increase compared to 2021

Among the exam takers, students were from 15 countries, including

• Côte d'Ivoire
• China
• Christmas Island
• Germany
• India
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Republic of Korea
• Rwanda
• Sweden
• Thailand
• Uganda
• United States
• Vietnam 

Since becoming a pilot project in December 2017, Kata Containers has rapidly become a highly sought-after and unique container runtime favored by Enterprises. In April of 2019, Kata Containers was the first Open Infrastructure Foundation pilot project to graduate, becoming an official open infrastructure project. In 2022, Kata Containers continued to expand its use cases and gained more users.

The Kata Containers project began as a combination of Intel Clear Containers & Hyper runV, with the objective of providing stronger isolation than traditional containers with minimal latency. Over the years many improvements have been made to Kata Containers code in pursuit of maintaining and improving security, performance and speed. One of the most exciting improvements is the move from Golang to Rust, which began in 2022 in Kata Containers 2.0 by way of transition to Rust Agent. The “Rustification” of Kata Containers progressed steadily throughout minor 2.x releases, and in October 2022 a Rust-based runtime-rs & Rust-based virtio-rs storage driver was introduced with the release of Kata Containers 3.0.0. Hypervisor support was updated as well, with support for Cloud-Hypervisor & QEMU updated to the latest respective releases along with new Dragonball hypervisor support added. 

Throughout 2021 and 2022, the Kata Containers community expanded Kata Containers’ usage scenario covering security isolation and performance isolation. This prevents different workloads from affecting each other in both security and performance aspects. Kata Containers has also maintained the support of the Confidential Containers use case with TDX/SEV/IBM SE enabled isolation, further expanding Kata Containers’ threat model by protecting the infrastructure and its workloads.

In 2022, the Kata Containers community continues to present its strategic relevance, well-defined governance procedures, commitment to technical best practices and open collaboration. Most importantly, they remain an actively engaged ecosystem of developers and users working together to create and maintain a truly unique alternative that integrates seamlessly with multiple architectures and hypervisors. In the spirit of open collaboration, community volunteers participated in a university mentorship program with Boston University, working closely with a group of undergraduate and graduate students to further implement Rust code into the Kata Containers project.

Kata Containers celebrated a significant increase in popularity in 2022, after Microsoft announced at KubeCon North America, that Kata Containers support has been added to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). When Kata Containers is deployed on top of an Azure-tuned Mariner Kernel and Cloud-Hypervisor it brings hardware-enforced isolation with a dedicated kernel per pod. This helps achieve higher security for workloads especially when they share a single AKS cluster.

Additionally, Red Hat released the Kata Containers-based Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers in October of 2022. OpenShift Sandbox Containers provide an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant container runtime using lightweight virtual machines (VMs) running your workloads in their own isolated kernel, contributing an additional layer of isolation to Red Hat’s defense-in-depth strategy.

The community-selected Architecture Committee went through two election cycles in February and November of 2021. Current AC chairs are Fabiano Fidêncio (Intel), Eric Ernst (Apple), Peng Tao (Ant Group), Samuel Ortiz (RivOS) and newly-elected Gerry Liu (Alibaba Cloud). 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. To better accommodate rapid community growth, the Architecture Committee will be expanded from five to seven seats for 2023.

In 2023, Kata Containers will continue to evolve as a fast and secure runtime through further Rust implementation and integrated Dragonball Sandbox technology, further reducing memory footprint along with installation & management complexity. In addition to further improvement of Kata Containers as a multi-hypervisor, multi-tenant container runtime that integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes, the Kata community will continue to be an outstanding example of open source community through mentorship & education.

The Kata Containers’ project code is hosted on GitHub under the Apache 2 license. To learn more about Kata Containers, and how to contribute and support the community, you can go to katacontainers.io or check out 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

Zuul is an open source CI/CD platform designed for test-driven open source projects and software development organizations that need to gate against multiple projects and systems before landing a single patch. 2022 marked the Zuul project's 10th birthday. Since its creation in 2012 to support OpenStack development needs, Zuul has transformed itself to become a general-purpose tool that you will find backing cloud, e-commerce, automotive software, and more software development needs and business.

Zuul's 10th year was more than just a major calendar milestone. Together Zuul and its components made more than 24 releases in 2022. One major milestone, version 5.0, was released at the end of January bringing major pieces of functionality that had been in the works for years: fully redundant software components and zero downtime upgrades. Prior to this release, a Zuul upgrade implied a downtime to restart the Zuul scheduler. Depending on the number of projects and jobs running at the time this could be quite disruptive. Now, Zuul users can upgrade with no visible impact as long as they run redundant components and step through each major version.

Zuul has added support for modern Ansible versions. The latest release of Zuul, 8.0.1, supports Ansible 6 and dropped support for older versions of Ansible. To make this happen it was necessary to change how Zuul Executors manage the Ansible runtime for jobs. Previously, Zuul attempted to limit the Ansible functionality that was accessible on the Zuul Executor out of an abundance of caution. When adding support for newer Ansible we realized that these limitations were often incomplete, difficult to update for new Ansible, and provided a false sense of security. To address this we've shifted to relying on bubblewrap to isolate the build environments. One major upside to this change is it gives jobs much more flexibility to run what they need to perform their testing. Another side effect of the Ansible updates is a change to the Python versions Zuul can use as a runtime. Newer Ansible requires Python 3.8 or newer, and Zuul has adopted the same requirement. 

Performance is another area of improvement for Zuul. Over the year, a few key metrics have greatly improved. Using OpenDev's Zuul deployment to help illustrate this we can see that the time to process pipeline events and Zuul reconfigurations has seen impressive improvements.

These metrics relate to how quickly jobs can begin running when there are new events to process. Improving these leads to quicker turnaround times for users.

Aiding Zuul developers and operators in identifying and improving performance bottlenecks is the addition of tracing support. Zuul has an initial OpenTelemetry implementation that can be used to visualize the processing of events in the system across the various Zuul microservices. One key benefit to tracing is being able to follow the life of events as they are processed by the scheduler, mergers, and executors.

Zuul also added a few interesting features like global semaphores and submit whole topic handling. Global semaphores allow Zuul installations to negotiate the use of limited shared resources across Zuul tenants. Submitting the whole topic is a Gerrit feature that allows you to land more than one change atomically at the same time. Zuul supports this functionality in Gerrit and emulates it for other code review systems.

Zuul's web interface has been updated to latest Patternfly 4 and includes more native Patternfly 4 elements. A good portion of this effort is transparent to end users, but will aid in the maintainability of the web code base. The rendered Ansible console log did receive a number of readability improvements as part of this process. Elements are easier to distinguish from one another and there is more visual consistency between the elements. Stronger integration with Zuul's authentication system and a visual representation of the job graph (the relationship between dependent jobs) have been added to the web interface as well.

Zuul's Nodepool component also saw a number of improvements throughout the year. An IBM Cloud VPC driver has been added allowing you to tie Nodepool into IBM Cloud VM resources. A "metastatic" driver was also added. This driver creates a new way of providing test resources. Instances are dynamically provisioned via one of the other existing drivers and then reused as if they are static resources. If the instance isn't used after some timeout, the resources are released back to the provider. This allows Nodepool users to cut down on expensive instance creation times while still keeping most of the benefits of dynamic resource management.

Existing Nodepool drivers also saw improvements. Some drivers, including the GCE and AWS drivers, were rewritten to use the standardized state machine driver framework. This brings consistency to driver behavior and reduces the amount of code that must be maintained between drivers. The AWS driver also saw a number of improvements like volume IOPS management, better quota handling, disk image uploads and IPv6 support.

The Zuul project is proud of what it has accomplished this year. Zuul is easier to manage and faster for its users. We look forward to continuing these trends in 2023. Look for Ansible 7 support, Python 3.11 support, per playbook semaphores,  modern Kubernetes integration, more nodepool driver consistency as we port more drivers to the state machine framework, and more. If you are an existing Zuul user or curious to learn more please reach out to us. We are happy to help new users get involved, listen to your feedback, and onboard new contributors. All of these methods of involvement are helpful.

Find us:

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

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

The project was launched in 2018 and since then the community has put out seven releases. StarlingX 7.0 was released in September 2022. This version of the platform included new features in areas such as security, distributed cloud and more.

One of the main focus areas of 2022 was the base operating system of the platform. The first release in the year, 6.0, delivered an updated version of the Linux kernel, 5.10, while keeping all the real-time features and performance tuning intact. The new kernel also brought enhancements in the networking space, like better configurability of the routing and forwarding interfaces. As a next step, the 7.0 release contained an experimental version of the platform where they replaced CentOS with Debian. This preview was made available with a limited feature set, but it provided a good opportunity to prepare for the switch that the 8.0 release is set to deliver.

The migration to the Debian-based platform affects most components of the project which is why the implementation work has been spreading across multiple release cycles. The community needed to prepare the build system to accommodate the new tooling that Debian introduced while ensuring thorough testing of all new and existing functionality.

Beyond the major change of the base operating system, the community also delivered new features and enhancements to the platform. In the area of security, contributors enhanced certificate management in the platform and added support for 'auditd' and security audit logging.

The distributed cloud functionality also received new features to further enhance performance and ease and efficiency of managing the infrastructure services and components. Sub-clouds can now be moved move between system controllers, which is a feature that can be used in both disaster recovery and maintenance scenarios. The feature also received scalability and performance enhancements, such as increasing the number of parallel operations and providing the ability to install a sub-cloud locally and then connect it to the distributed infrastructure.

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

• Precision Time Protocol enhancements
• More fine-grained configuration
• PTP GNSS/SyncE support
• Moving from Armada to FluxCD for deploying containerized services
• Bond CNI plugin integration
• Further devices driver support from vendors such as Intel, Mellanox and Broadcom

The community held two election cycles in 2022 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 onboard newcomers to the project. There were presentations about the project at events such as the Open Infrastructure Summit, OpenInfra Live, Edge Computing World and Kubernetes at the Edge at KubeCon NA, and contributors discussed technical details about the project at the two online Project Teams Gathering (PTG) events.

StarlingX is widely used in production among large telecom operators around the globe, such as T-Systems, Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI and more. Operators are utilizing the container-based platform for their 5G and O-RAN backbone infrastructures along with relying on the project's features to easily manage the lifecycle of the infrastructure components and services. Organizations in further industry segments like industrial automation and agriculture are also looking into the platform for its capabilities to support real-time and mission-critical applications that are often distributed and deployed on a large scale.

The StarlingX code is hosted on GitHub under the Apache 2 license. Learn about the project, and 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 list: lists.starlingx.io

Airship was announced as an OpenInfra Foundation pilot project at the 2018 OpenStack Summit in Vancouver with the mission to create a unified, fully-declarative, versatile platform that transforms bare-metal infrastructure into a resilient Kubernetes cluster supporting user-defined workloads. In practice, this meant that the project has been using YAML files and a declarative method to define the structure of the infrastructure services, such as Kubernetes and OpenStack components to be deployed on top of bare-metal servers.

By the start of 2022, the community had successfully created a platform to install a Kubernetes-based environment and deploy OpenStack services in containers on top of it. The project had two releases, where the second release provided some fundamental architectural changes and was starting to include support for deploying services on top of public clouds as well. Airship has been running in production at AT&T to power its Network Cloud infrastructure.

At the beginning of the year the community had contributors from companies such as AT&T, Microsoft and Mirantis. Throughout 2022, the project transitioned into a production maintenance phase, where the community's activities shifted over to maintaining the existing software rather than working towards a roadmap with new functionality.

The community also adopted a simplified governance model that is based on consensus-based decision-making, to allow the current and future contributors of the project to collaborate and shape the governance model easily and efficiently. If you have questions or want to understand your open source options, contact [email protected].

Further information about Airship:

• Code: opendev.org/airship
• Website: airshipit.org

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

In 2022 the Mass Open Cloud became the Mass Open Cloud Alliance.

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 Op1st Community Cloud, a prototype of 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
• Operate First Community Cloud: The Operate First Community Cloud has grown substantially to approximately 250 members and 50 projects, such as OKD, OS-Climate, Apicurio, and acts as an experimentation environment for Red Hat Emerging Technologies and beyond. The architecture is the blueprint for NERC.
• • Infrastructure 198 namespaces (77 user namespaces), 5 clusters, 71 nodes, 1582 cores
  • GitHub community diversity: 37% Red Hat, 63% others/unknown
  • Active media channels on YouTube, Twitter and since November also Mastodon
  • Bi-weekly community meet up started season two in Oct. 2022
  • 15+ services running e.g. Backstage and OpenDataHub

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.

The OpenDev team has continued to focus on streamlining and sustainability through 2022. The goal is to make it possible to run our most important services as efficiently as possible. In 2022 several services were shut down and removed. The Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) cluster was removed and the OpenStack project moved their log analysis workload to an Amazon hosted OpenSearch cluster. Running alongside the ELK cluster was tooling to store and view Subunit test results; these services have also been removed. Finally, we shut down our Ethercalc server as its primary user was the PTG, and we could repurpose PTGbot for scheduling PTG activities. These cleanups have helped free up time to focus on services like Gerrit, Zuul, and Mailman mailing lists. All three of these services have received major improvements in 2022.

Over the course of 2022, the OpenDev team has performed three major Gerrit upgrades. We started the year with a Gerrit 3.3 to 3.4 upgrade, performed the 3.4 to 3.5 upgrade midyear, and ended the year with a 3.5 to 3.6 upgrade. Each of these upgrades was tested in our Zuul CI system prior to performing it live in production. At the time of the 3.6 upgrade Gerrit had released 3.7 just a few weeks prior; we believe that this is the closest we have been to the latest version of Gerrit in almost a decade. Many of our users noticed that Gerrit's Java MINA SSH server was not compatible with recent OpenSSH client releases when using RSA keys. The OpenDev team worked with the MINA SSH and Gerrit projects to debug, fix, and test this issue across those code bases. Users should find their RSA keys are working again regardless of their local OpenSSH client version.

At the end of 2021, the OpenDev team upgraded Zuul to a version that supported rolling restarts without downtime. Since then OpenDev has implemented automated weekly upgrades of Zuul which deploy the latest version of the master to production. This has enabled us to continue working closely with the Zuul project to provide early verification of new features and bug fixes in a non-trivial environment. In return OpenDev gets access to these features as quickly as possible. We have also used this relationship to help address our own use case needs. For example, the OpenDev team uses Zuul for the continuous deployment of its services. The OpenDev team implemented a feature to disable Zuul console streaming on static hosts as this isn't beneficial for our continuous deployment use cases. Soon after that feature landed we were able to take advantage of it. Over the course of 2022, Zuul updated its list of supported Ansible versions. At the end of 2022, Zuul supports Ansible 6 and all of our users are able to take advantage of this modern version of Ansible.  We also deployed a new Keycloak service to support Zuul's new authentication system.

Our Mailman 2 mailing list server is our oldest living server. Despite being well cared for and regularly upgraded this pet has been showing its age. The server itself needs a refresh and Mailman 2 needs to be replaced with Mailman 3. We deployed a shiny new server to run Mailman 3 and migrated lists.opendev.org and lists.zuul-ci.org to it. We plan to migrate the rest of our mailing list domains to this server in the new year. This will bring simplified list management for our users as well as search capability, web-based posting, and modern user authentication to our list archives.

Every year we've got a good chunk of work to do in order to keep up with the World around us. We added Ubuntu Jammy, Fedora 36, and Rocky Linux test nodes to our Nodepool installation. We support Ubuntu Jammy for our control plane services and a couple of servers have been replaced with Jammy nodes. We upgraded our bastion server as well as the version of Ansible it executes to manage our systems. Python 3.10 and 3.11 base docker images were built to support the deployment of control plane services on newer Python versions. The Jitsi Meet installation behind Meetpad received a configuration refresh and is now continuously deploying the latest stable release of Jitsi Meet, solving some long-standing audio problems reported by many users. This is just a sample of the many things we do to keep the lights on around here. Every little bit of help is greatly appreciated.

Users of our collaboratory pushed more than 100K change revisions in 2022, which received nearly a million comments from reviewers and automation. This led to gating and merging 36K new changes into the thousands of repositories we host.

OpenDev has been busy in 2022. Thank you to everyone who contributed to OpenDev in 2022. Looking ahead to 2023 we don't expect it to be any quieter. We will be working on our Gerrit 3.7 upgrade, finishing the mailing list migrations to the new Mailman 3 server, upgrading server OSes to Ubuntu Jammy and keeping up with all of the work required to keep the lights on. If any of this sounds interesting to you, and you would like to get involved, please contact us.

Find us:

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

OpenInfra Community & Mentoring Programs

OpenInfra User Groups

Helena Spease, Marketing & Community Associate, OpenInfra Foundation

In 2022, we saw 1,447 new members join various user groups across the globe. The OpenStack Ghana User Group experienced the most significant growth, gaining 265 new members in 2022.

2022 was a year of reconnection for the OpenInfra community. User groups showed their commitment to the community by organizing a total of 21 meetups across. This past year, 16 different groups reached hundreds in their respective communities. In the first half of 2022, we saw primarily virtual meetups and even with the option of meeting in person, most groups opted for hybrid-style meetups to increase their reach.

In December community organizers got together for their first-ever community meeting. This was an opportunity for community organizers to gather, meet one another and share their experiences hosting meetups and OpenInfra Days. We have also created a Global Community Slack Workspace for community organizers to collaborate asynchronously.

Outreachy Program

The OpenInfra Foundation’s partnership with the Software Freedom Conservancy via the Outreachy program brought more diversity to our open source communities and taught one student about open source collaboration this year. 

During the year, we had the opportunity to have two interns work on OpenStack - Franca Mgbogu and Skoech. Franca Mgbogu worked on client support for Manila in the Horizon dashboard through help from Carlos Da Silva and Maari Tamm. Meanwhile, Skoech worked on the Neutron project engineering the ability for network cascade deletion in OpenStack Neutron. Lajos Katona from Neutron supported her in the work she did.  

While his internship is ongoing, Hassan Ashgar began his work late in 2022 on OpenStack’s Manila and Horizon projects. With the help of mentors Goutham Pacha Ravi and Carlos da Silva, Hassan picked up Franca’s work on implementing features for the Manila User interface in the horizon dashboard. 

Taking the time to mentor interns like Hassan, Skoech and Franca is extremely valuable for everyone involved- it teaches them how to work in a global community on a huge open source project and it brings new perspective, diversity, and energy to the community!

Mentorship at Boston University

For the first time, we were able to participate in the Fundamentals of Cloud Computing course with two OpenInfra projects. This was the first year for Kata Containers. 

A group of students worked together with mentors from Kata Container and community members (Chao Qu, James Hunt, and Tim Zhang). Five students - Alex Lee, Dabin Jang, Junyi Tang, Tingzhou Yuan, and Zhenhuan Wu - had the opportunity to get to know Kata Containers and the community while doing real work on the open source project and building many skills that they will be able to take into their last years at university before going on to graduate. Their work on merging agent-ctl into kata-ctl and increasing unit test coverage will have lasting impact on kata containers as a software. 

Simultaneously, a different group of students elected to work on the OpenStackClient and the OpenStackSDK with Artem Goncharov, Stephen Finucane, and Kendall Nelson. Daniel Wilson, Ariel Berkowicz, Harsh Mutha, and Huda Irshad learned how to contribute to OpenStack and worked on implementing Nova API calls in the OpenStackSDK further helping the migration to a unified client experience for users. From September-December they pushed 18 patches to remove the gaps that exist between the novaclient and the OpenStackSDK. 

Huge thank you to all of our mentors for investing their time in students and the future of open source!

Mentorship at North Dakota State University

North Dakota State University’s collaboration with the OpenInfra Foundation was formalized this year via an Associate Membership in addition to continuing participating in their Capstone Course that takes place during the second semester of the year. 

For the first time, the Capstone Course this year had two OpenInfra projects participating! Two mentors from the Kata Containers community, James Hunt and Fabiano Fidencio, worked to mentor four students (Braden Rayhorn, Christopher Parks, Garrett Mahin and Jack Hance) for the spring semester from January to May. The students collaborated with the mentors and the larger Kata community to increase test coverage of the Kata agent which helps ensure a higher level of confidence in functionality for one of the core Kata components. 

In parallel Goutham Pacha Ravi, Carlos de Silva, and Victoria Martinez de la Cruz mentored four students (Samuel Dailey, Cameron Kolodjski, Shkoh Hamasoor and Jonah Fisher) to work on implementing UX for Manila share networks in Horizon. The students fully integrated into the OpenStack community and Manila team by using IRC and attending the weekly meetings, working with a geographically distributed set of mentors, and pushing a number of patches to a variety of repositories.

In the new year, both Kata Containers and OpenStack hope to participate in the Capstone course again. 

Mentorship at Oregon State University

This year our partnership with Oregon State University continued via mentorship with university students rising to community member status in OpenStack. The Oregon State University Open Source Lab helped one student in particular learn all the skills required to work on OpenStack and on a global community driven open source project. 

Violet Kurtz was the primary student that worked with Stephen Finucane, Artem Goncharov and Kendall Nelson on the OpenStackClient and the OpenStackSDK this year. She worked on a variety of patches in the two main repositories helping other OpenStack services get API functionality implemented in the SDK before changing the OpenStackClient to use the SDK as opposed to the legacy clients that many services still maintain. Violet completed two huge sections of work for Nova within the SDK and Client which continued the efforts of our previous intern, Ryan Zimmerman, from 2021. Violet is going on to graduate and her work on OpenStack and with the community has given her many skills she can take forward into her career. 

We are very excited to begin a new chapter in the mentorship program with a different student, Antonia Gaete. She has already begun with the basics of getting her development environment setup and working through the contributor guide. In the new year, she will work more closely with community members to pick up where Violet left off. 

OpenInfra Events

OpenInfra Live

The OpenInfra Foundation introduced OpenInfra Live in March of 2021, a weekly interactive series covering all things OpenInfra, streaming to YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn on Thursdays, as well as being posted to WeChat. To date, the OpenInfra Foundation has produced over 50 episodes, with an average of 100 live viewers that grows to 1,500 views within the first month of streaming. 

One of the most popular, recurring series on OpenInfra Live are large scale operator Q&As brought to viewers by the Large Scale SIG. In these episodes, a panel of operators—typically Belmiro Moreira, currently at the European Space Agency and previously at CERN, Mohammed Naser from Vexxhost, and Arnaud Morin from OVH—interviewing operators from an organization running OpenStack at scale. Questions include common challenges, any custom tooling leveraged, and other common OpenStack topics including upgrades, networking, and integration with other open source software. Operators interviewed in 2022 include Schwarz Group, Yahoo, and OVH.   

While episodes are promoted by the OpenInfra Foundation, the global community has the opportunity to program, host and participate in an OpenInfra Live episode. Submissions are continuing to be collected here, so if you have an open infrastructure story you’d like to share, let us know! 

All episodes of OpenInfra Live are available on YouTube.

OpenInfra Summit

The first OpenInfra Summit since the Shanghai event in November of 2019 was held in Berlin, Germany in June 2022, gathering over 800 attendees from 65+ different countries to discuss 30+ open source projects. In addition, to use cases from users like Bloomberg, Ant Group, BBC, Volvo and more, there were several announcements made in Berlin: 

• The OpenInfra Foundation announced its new Directed Fund model. 
• Bloomberg and Vexxhost became the OpenInfra Foundation’s newest Gold Members. Bloomberg is a global finance, media and technology company that has been an active contributor to and user of OpenStack since 2013. Vexxhost is a Canadian cloud computing provider offering OpenStack-powered public cloud, private cloud and consulting services to its customers in over 150 countries.
• OVHCloud and Ant Group tied to win this year’s Superuser Award for large-scale deployment of OpenStack, and innovative use of Kata Containers to reduce carbon emissions, respectively. 
• The Zuul community celebrated the 10th anniversary of the release of its open source continuous integration (CI) project gating software designed to help developers stop merging broken code. Volvo, BMW, and Workday were among the organizations in attendance that shared their production use cases at the Summit.

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

Learn more about the open source users, collaborative sessions and vendor announcements from the 2022 OpenInfra Summit on Superuser.  

Project Teams Gathering (PTG)

This year, we held two Project Team Gatherings (PTG), one in April and the other in October.

The April PTG had a total of 349 registered attendees and 36 teams across the OpenInfra community participated. We welcomed StarlingX, the Edge Computing Group and the Diversity & Inclusion WG in addition to a large subset of OpenStack service teams and Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Many of our pilot projects opted to focus on the OpenInfra Summit and Forum instead of holding discussions at the PTG this time, but we still had excellent representation and turnout. Many of the OpenStack teams focused on what they were implementing for the Zed release having recently wrapped up the Yoga release in March. 

The second virtual PTG  was an even larger success than the previous, having had a new charge of energy following the Berlin OpenInfra Summit. The reported attendance from track moderators showed over 600 people attending the 46 teams that hosted meetings. Those teams were distributed across Foundation level working groups, OpenStack Teams, StarlingX, Kata Containers and even had a repeat appearance from the Kubernetes folks.

One new feature of the second PTG was the introduction of operator hours. This effort was organized by the Technical Committee with influence from the OpenStack Operators to get more operator feedback directly to the projects about how new features might be implemented to give the best user experience to OpenStack users and operators. 17 hours of operator hours took place over the week of the PTG and were carefully scheduled to minimize overlap so that operators and users could attend them all. Most operator hours were for the main OpenStack services like Cinder, Glance, Keystone and Nova but there was a healthy variety outside of the usual suspects as well like Skyline, OpenStack Ansible and the Baremetal SIG. The OpenStack Technical Committee hopes to organize more sessions like this in the future to further close the feedback loop and unite developers and users and operators together into a more cohesive and inclusive community.

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 the OpenInfra projects.

Several communities hosted virtual, in-person and hybrid events this year, spanning across the globe, including:

• OpenInfra, Cloud Native, Magma & Hyperledger Days India 2022
• OpenStack & Kubernetes Days Indonesia 2022
• OpenInfra Community Days Korea 2022
• OpenInfra Days Turkey 2022
• OpenInfra Days Vietnam 2022
• OpenInfra Days Mexico 2022
• OpenInfra Days China 2022
• OpenInfra Days Asia 2022
• Cloud Operator Days Tokyo 2022

A rising trend we saw throughout 2022 was for OpenInfra Day organizers to partner with parallel open source communities to create cross-community collaborations such as OpenInfra, Cloud Native, Magma & Hyperledger Days India 2022.

The OpenInfra Foundation supported and sponsored each of these events. Overall, the events drew over 85,000 attendees.

OpenInfra Special Interest Groups (SIGs) & Working Groups

Large Scale SIG

The OpenStack Large Scale SIG is an open group of OpenStack large deployments operators interested in sharing their operational experience. The Large Scale SIG provides opportunities for discussion and produces documentation to help the next generation of OpenStack users reach massive scale in their deployments.

Over the course of 2022, the SIG met in person during the OpenInfra Summit in Berlin, and virtually over 16 meetings on IRC. The SIG also produced three OpenInfra Live episodes, each doing a deep dive on the operational challenges of a specific large scale deployment, with OVHCloud, Yahoo and Schwarz Group as guests.

Learn more about the SIG at https://docs.openstack.org/large-scale/

Bare Metal SIG

During 2022, the Bare Metal Special Interest Group continued to host in their monthly meetups speakers from the community, highlighting areas related to bare metal development, such as “How to scale Ironic?” or “What is new in the latest releases?”, as well as presentations from production deployments, such as from the Berlin Institute of Health (show-and-tell) or G-Research (Bare metal Kubernetes). As usual, all sessions were recorded and have been made available on the “OpenStack: Bare Metal SIG Series” YouTube channel.

As the focal point for bare metal topics in the OpenInfra community, the SIG also prepared and hosted a forum session at the 2022 Berlin OpenInfra Summit, discussing operational pain points and potential areas for future focus with operators. The super-lively session in a room that was down to standing-only showed how a huge number of deployments used specific Ironic features, some even to the surprise of the core upstream team.

For 2023, and in order to increase engagement with the SIG meetups and the bare metal community, the SIG members consider moving to a quarterly cadence and to make changes to the format of the SIG sessions: following the experience from the forum session, a panel format will aim at making the sessions more interactive and therefore more attractive for new members.

Diversity & Inclusion Working Group

The Diversity and Inclusion Working Group continued reaching out to all OpenInfra 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. 

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

In 2023, we plan on conducting diversity surveys across all projects as well as continuing to aid OpenInfra projects in their efforts to remove divisive language and use more inclusive terminology. We also hope to be able to resume efforts to connect with the community and improve inclusivity measures for virtual and in-person events.

Environmental Sustainability Working Group

This year marks the creation of the Environmental Sustainability Working Group! Beginning as a gathering of minds Forum at the OpenInfra Summit in Berlin, we concluded that there was work to be done in this area amongst the Open Infrastructure Foundation project communities. While most participants were from OpenStack, there was also representation from Zuul, StarlingX and Kata Containers. After some debate, the decision was made to be a Foundation level working group, to ensure the broadest reach possible rather than limiting ourselves to just OpenStack or trying to coordinate many smaller groups for each OpenInfra project. 

At the Project Teams Gathering (PTG) in October, the newly formed Environmental Sustainability SIG met to create vision statements to guide our direction as we are still developing and getting started. We began with an exercise where we all wrote down ideas, themes and topics that we each felt were important to the core ideals of the working group. After that, we formed two general visions - a 10-year vision statement and a five-year vision statement. These statements and our mission statement will provide a framework for discussions. 

Mission Statement: Our goal is to further environmental sustainability in open infrastructure.

Ten-Year Statement: We see the environment changing before our eyes in negative ways, and it is our vision:

• In 10 years, to have established the building blocks for computing technologies and improved operational/usage patterns to help move the needle in a meaningful way toward the environmental sustainability of open infrastructure.
• Five-Year Statement: It is our vision in five years to see foundational technologies in place and available for use.

If you are interested in getting involved, subscribe to the foundation mailing list and look for emails with the [Environmental Sustainability] tag in the subject line. 

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. Last year we formed two new add-on programs, Key Manager and Load Balancer and released two new guidelines - 2022.06 and 2022.11. 

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 with DNS
• OpenStack with Key Manager
• OpenStack with Load Balancer
• OpenStack with Orchestration
• OpenStack with Shared File System

During the Summit in Berlin in June 2022, we received feedback from vendors and users that they find the tests not strict enough to ensure 100% interoperability from their experience. Another note brought to our attention is that the tooling is a bit complex and complicated to use.

We have been working on a single container which would contain all necessary tooling to run interoperability tests which would improve the user experience. Besides that, we’ve been brainstorming and discussing possibilities of adding more strict tests to the interop portfolio to address the feedback from the Summit.

In 2023 we want to finish the container as well as we would like to continue discussing options we have in regard to stricter tests to ensure better interoperability. 

See our wiki page for our contact information.

Marketing Performance

Media Relations and Analyst Relations

Media and analyst relations efforts are led by a distributed team of professionals in the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific. This team engaged journalists and analysts worldwide in dialogue, proactively delivering news, commentary, and contributed byline content for both the Foundation and for its sponsored projects. Community news highlights are available at https://openinfra.dev/press/. All news announcements are distributed by newswire and direct email and posted to the appropriate Foundation or project website. To receive news announcements on the day of their release, sign up at Open Infrastructure Foundation News. In addition, sign up for the Opennfra community newsletter at https://openinfra.dev/newsletter/.  

The Foundation hosted three key media/analyst events in 2022: 

• Virtual news conferences in March, featuring OpenStack Yoga and the agenda for the Open Infrastructure Summit
• Open Infrastructure Summit Berlin in June: nearly two dozen media attended on site or covered virtually; a roundtable-style news conference was conducted for on-site media following Day One keynotes.
• Recorded news briefings in October, highlighting StarlingX 7.0, Kata Containers 3.0.0 and Foundation updates.

In addition, the PR team distributed news releases and conducted proactive outreach for these key announcements:

• OpenInfra Foundation seats new board of directors, names Thierry Carrez as General Manager (January)

• OpenInfra Foundation welcomes six new associate members (February)

• Open Infrastructure Summit speakers announced (March)

• Additional summit speakers announced (May) 

• Save the date for OpenInfra in-person events–PTG, 2023 Summit (June)

• Vexxhost upgrades to Gold Member (June)

• Bloomberg joins as Gold Member (June)

• 10 years of Zuul (June)

• Directed Funding (June)

• Open Infrastructure Summit Berlin 2022 Keynotes (June)

• Superuser Award Winners: OVHcloud and Ant Group (June)

• OpenStack User Survey: OpenStack exceeds 40M cores (November)

• Project software releases: 

  • OpenStack Yoga (March) and Zed (October) releases
  • Zuul 5.0 (February) 
  • StarlingX 6.0 (February) and 7.0 (September)
  • Kata Containers 3.0.0 (October)

Analysis of global coverage indicates that the Open Infrastructure Foundation and its supported projects received more than 16,383 mentions in 2022.  Media coverage was distributed globally: North America, Europe and Asia Pacific regions had the highest number of mentions (in that order), but coverage extended to Africa, Australia & New Zealand, the Caribbean, the Middle East and South America as well. 

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 through email.

In 2022, the newsletter saw a redesign that supported a format to help promote opportunities within the community such as job openings, news from the OpenInfra Foundation members and project updates. The new design of the OpenInfra Foundation’s newsletter opted for a shortened format. 

Looking forward to 2023, 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].

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, governed by the Foundation or other communities.

In 2022, the Foundation reached over 420,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and made over 2,700,000 impressions. The Foundation is also running multiple WeChat accounts and groups that cover various topics including OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX, multi-arch SIG and more, specifically tailored to the OpenInfra community in China. In addition, the OpenInfra Foundation joined the community on Mastodon.

The Foundation also has a large audience on its YouTube channel. With the weekly OpenInfra Live episodes, we have received 355,800 views, 28,700 watch hours and an increase of 1,600 subscribers in 2022.