Empowering A Global Community to Overcome Open Source Threats

Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director, OpenInfra Foundation

I can't recall a time in my life when the principles of open source have faced more significant threats than today. The landscape is rife with challenges such as fears surrounding new technologies, especially in the realm of AI, and a pervasive misunderstanding of the risks that open source may pose to supply chain security. These concerns have led to policies and regulatory proposals that pose the risk of overregulating open source, hamstringing our communities, and stifling the very innovation that open source has come to represent.

Adding to this, the global rise of nationalism poses complex and formidable risks to global collaboration—the very essence that has fueled the success and impact of open source on a global scale.

Yet, despite these challenges, I remain tremendously optimistic about the future of open source and open infrastructure. Throughout past challenges, open source has not only weathered storms but has emerged stronger. Indeed, open source is more pervasive and integral to our lives than ever before. Ironically, the very technologies that instill fear also harbor the potential to unlock unprecedented innovation and positive impacts on humanity. Open source—specifically, open infrastructure—is the best way to unlock that potential while maintaining transparency.

So, here we stand at a pivotal moment in history, and the question arises: How can the OpenInfra Foundation make a difference?

Empowering Our Global Community

Our strength lies in our community—560+ organizations and over 110,000 individuals spanning 180 countries. We've embarked on regional initiatives, with the launch of OpenInfra Asia and OpenInfra Europe hubs. Both organizations have now seated their advisory boards and are poised to amplify our collective voice on policy issues and spearhead strong regional community growth. Additionally, our support of the Open Policy Alliance strengthens our commitment to open source initiatives, as does our support of the Open Source Initiative, particularly its recent leadership in defining Open Source AI.

Creating Opportunities for Collaboration

In-person meetings remain indispensable, and the 2023 OpenInfra Summit in Vancouver was an example of that. Attendees from 50 countries and 335 organizations, with 45% attending for the first time, were inspired by keynotes featuring cutting-edge topics from industry leaders. Looking ahead, 2024 promises a regional OpenInfra Summit Asia and a special edition OpenInfra Days series throughout Europe, fostering more opportunities for collaboration.

Project Support

Our commitment to supporting communities remains unwavering. OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX, Zuul, Airship, OpenInfra Labs, and OpenDev continue to receive our support. Notably, our new initiative, Directed Funding, enables OpenInfra members to contribute directly to the specific projects that resonate with them, ensuring sustained growth and innovation.

As we navigate the complex landscape of 2024, our community's strength, innovative capacity, and resilience are our greatest assets. The achievements highlighted in this report bear testament to what we've accomplished together in the past year. This should remind us of our collective potential and be a source of inspiration for addressing the challenges that lie ahead.

I have no doubt that in the face of new threats, the OpenInfra community will embrace the opportunities to innovate, collaborate and strengthen the foundation of open source. Together, we can continue to shape a future where openness and collaboration lead to groundbreaking advancements.

Thank you for another great year. Here's to many more.

Note from the Chair of the OpenInfra Foundation Board of Directors

Julia Kreger, Board Chair

When looking back at the past year, it is impossible to ignore just how difficult this year has been. It is also difficult to put into words. Many involved with open source seek to leverage the open source commons to solve the problem or challenge before them. Often, we seek to leave things in a better state than when we found them to make the path easier for those who come after us.

However, we live in a changing world where the power and capabilities of open source entices its use, and increases its visibility for government regulation as an economic alternative. The uncertainty of pending and in-process regulation creates an environment where we also tend to change the way we think as uncertainty is a source of stress.

That is before we consider the stress that is upon contributors due to conflict outside of their control. Similarly, rumors of regulations under discussion which may hamper future collaboration also create stress.

But we also live in an exciting time where technological possibilities are evolving rapidly and the need for open source infrastructure software is stronger than ever. As technology evolves, especially in a time of high visibility for technology, it is only natural for there to be a heightened level of scrutiny and regulation. The key challenge is recognizing, evolving and responding to the challenges before us.

One challenge has been the issue of regional context. The need to share that context has been why we rotate our events from region to region. Historically, when one regional context does not match another, discussions can lose velocity due to a lack of mutual understanding. This is one of the reasons why we launched the regional hubs, OpenInfra Europe and OpenInfra Asia, to help incubate and spread the context.

The regional hubs are also well-timed because this year we’ve come to understand that the pandemic greatly changed how willing contributors are to travel great distances and that has forced a re-evaluation of our events strategy. We now foresee local organizers as the key driving force to an event’s success, as they can help bridge a regional context to an event far better than someone on the other side of the planet can.

Simplification of a past process seems to be a repeating theme for us this past year. Another great example of that and one of which I’m very proud of is simplifying special casing in the OpenInfra Foundation’s bylaws. The Board of Directors worked to simplify these bylaws because they were written at a different time and now that the world has evolved, the updates will better enable staff and contributors to navigate the challenges ahead. 

And while I speak of challenges ahead, for there are always challenges ahead, this year we have seen increased adoption of our projects. Our projects continue to move forward with bug fixes and features on a regular cadence.

It is easy to let stress and uncertainty fog the road before us and hinder our ability to move forward. Something we need to remember is that we need to continue to progress even though change can be hard. After all, we are our own advocates to facilitate change. Remember to listen and be part of the discussion. Spread the good word about your work. Share the context of the projects in which you work and why. Help make the world a better place by embracing simplicity and positive change! 

We just have to remember that we need to continue to move forward. Change is hard, and we are, after all, our own best advocates to facilitate change. Remember to listen and be part of the discussion! I encourage you to take part! Spread the good word about your works! Share the context of the projects in which you work and why! Help make the world a better place by embracing simplicity and positive change!

State of OpenInfra

Thierry Carrez, General Manager, OpenInfra Foundation

We started 2023 with three goals for the OpenInfra Foundation. The first one was about increasing regional collaboration opportunities. OpenInfra is truly global, but each region has slightly different priorities and challenges. How to make sure that those concerns are heard and reflected in the global organization strategy?

As Jonathan and Julia mentioned, we decided to create two regional hubs, one in Europe and one in Asia, to help bridge the regional issues with the global organization. OpenInfra member organizations can participate in their regional hub at no additional cost. Each hub has an Advisory Board composed of regional OpenInfra leaders to help drive the feedback loop from the region to the global organization. Beyond that, we also decided to overhaul our event strategy, evolving from global events to a more regional approach that is more in tune with the current state of conference travel. The end result of those changes is that there will be more and more opportunities for our members to collaborate at the regional level.

This feeds into the second goal for the year, which was about increasing member engagement and satisfaction. Our regional hubs provide additional opportunities to engage, collaborate or raise concerns. We organized strategic workshops in Vancouver and Beijing. Foundation staff traveled all around the world to meet with our members and communities in China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, France, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands. This was challenging, but also necessary as for some of those countries we did not have any opportunity to visit our members since the pandemic.

Finally, our third goal was to onboard projects through the new project fund model that we created in 2022. We engaged with OSPOs at major companies and OpenInfra is now clearly positioned as an option for organizations willing to launch new open collaborations around infrastructure software. We are currently talking to potential founding organizations for several project funds, but building the critical mass to make it happen sustainably takes time. We hope to be able to announce good news early in 2024.

Overall it was a very busy year for OpenInfra! 2023 was challenging for open source in general, with new threats to our open collaboration model that need to be addressed and countered. With your help and support, we will continue to fight the good fight in 2024!

OpenInfra Regional Hubs

Wes Wilson, VP of Operations, OpenInfra Foundation

The regional hubs were created with the purpose of promoting and protecting the open source communities and technologies in these regions where the OpenInfra community has rapidly expanded. These hubs provide opportunities for the Foundation to gather more input from a regional perspective, helping to influence regional and global actions. They also provide a mechanism for regional output, through event coordination and local representation. Participating organizations of both hubs gather together in:

• Advancing open source infrastructure in the region
• Discussing regional strategic issues
• Gathering regional feedback and elevating local voices
• Coordinating local communities and events
• Conducting regional business development and market research
• Providing local programs for nurturing the next generation of open source contributors 

OpenInfra Europe

The global open source landscape has proven to be both challenged and grown through the activity that has taken place in Europe over the past several years. Given their impact on open infrastructure and involvement in the OpenInfra Foundation, establishing a regional hub in Europe was an obvious decision. Participating organizations represent over ten countries and have quickly organized to address the unique and valuable European landscape. Some of their initial priorities are protecting the essence of true open source collaboration in the face of new regulations, growing the regional ecosystem, and accelerating cloud and container technologies. OpenInfra Europe is a Belgian nonprofit association, supported by participating organizations including OpenInfra Gold and Platinum members Ericsson, Canonical, Cleura, Deutsche Telecom and more. 

The inaugural advisory board of OpenInfra Europe comprises:

Platinum Member Representative: 

• Phil Robb, Ericsson, Chairperson

Gold Member Representatives: 

• Johan Christenson, Cleura 
• Tytus Kurek, Canonical
• Sebastian Wenner, Deutsche Telekom

Local Community Representatives:

• Celine Bousquet, Societe Generale
• Eric Kessels, Fairbanks
• Stig Telfer, StackHPC
• Kurt Garloff, Sovereign Cloud Stack / Open Source Business Alliance
• Soumaya Msallem, Red Hat
• Allison Randal

OpenInfra Europe will be helping to organize a special series of OpenInfra Days in Europe in 2024, set up in a way that allows attendees, speakers and sponsors to travel from event to event back to back. More details on this special event can be found here. Learn more about OpenInfra Europe and join the public mailing list. 

OpenInfra Asia

The community in Asia continues to grow into a strong contingent of the OpenInfra community, currently representing about 40% of individual OpenInfra Foundation members worldwide. With member organizations distributed across seven countries, OpenInfra Asia is a clear way to bring OpenInfra Foundation members from all around Asia together to tackle similar pain points and seize mutual opportunities. The initial focuses range from accelerating the development of virtualization and container technologies, promoting the regional cloud infrastructure market, and expanding the ecosystem in Asia. OpenInfra Asia was established as a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG) in Singapore, supported by participating organizations such as OpenInfra Foundation Platinum and Gold Members Ant Group, Huawei, 99Cloud, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, H3C, Nipa Cloud, NEC, Okestro, Tencent Cloud, ZTE and more. 

The inaugural advisory board of OpenInfra Asia consists of:

Platinum Member Representatives: 

• Richard Bian, Ant Group
• Zhou Junyi, Huawei

Gold Member Representatives: 

• Shuquan Huang, 99cloud
• Xiangyu Li, China Mobile
• Huaxing Zhang, China Telecom
• Yulong Liu, China Unicom
• James Guo, H3C
• Brin Zhang, Inspur
• Young Gwang Kim, Okestro
• Xiang Li, ZTE

Local Community Representatives:

• Hasegawa Akihiro, AXLBIT
• Nguyen Trong Vinh, Viettel
• Vipin Rathi, eOTF
• Saputro Aryulianto, Btech

OpenInfra Asia will help organize the upcoming OpenInfra Summit Asia, slated for September 2-3, 2024 in Seoul, Korea. Learn more about OpenInfra Asia and join the public mailing list.

State of OpenInfra in China

Haoyang Li, China Community Manager, OpenInfra Foundation 

Overview

In 2023, the OpenInfra community in China continued growing in three major areas: OpenStack, Kata Containers and Compute Force Network Working Group. With OpenStack maintaining its second-largest community and market, we welcome two new silver members, Changjiang Computing and PowerLeader Computing. We also welcome new associate members, of the OpenEuler community, to join us. This year we have implemented many successful LOKI cases integrated with OpenEuler in China, including large-scale hybrid deployment on Tianyi Cloud.

In China, most community outreach, technical discussions, event previews, summaries, etc. are completed through WeChat public accounts and work groups. In the past year, the community's official account operations on WeChat have grown steadily. The total number of registered WeChat official accounts has exceeded 12,000, an increase of 9.3%. The following is the growth chart of community public account subscribers from 2021 to 2023,

OpenStack

For OpenStack upstream development, the China community mainly involves three components, Cyborg, Skyline and Venus, two of which were open sourced and submitted to upstream in 2022.

With a year of development, Cyborg had 121 commits in total, from more than 8 organizations. New feature development includes new vGPU, MIG driver integration and device enable/disable management, etc.

Skyline continues building its momentum in 2023, with 151 commits in total, from more than 5 organizations. New features are also merged and released in the latest OpenStack upstream release. 

Venus keeps its project development activity as well, with 119 commits in total, and more than 6 organizations contributed to the upstream project development.

Kata Containers

Kata Containers has maintained a very high level of activity and extensive participation from multiple organizations in the past year, including Ant Group, Alibaba, China Mobile, China Unicom, Inspur Data, and ByteDance. With the release of Kata Containers 3.0, the features of Kata Containers have become more complete. In China, the community held a Kata Containers meetup to promote the community to exchange ongoing solutions and explore new technologies with each other. As one of the active open source projects, Kata Containers has also participated in the summer Open Source Summer activities and KCD 2023 Hangzhou activities and has received extensive participation from Alibaba, Ant Group, and some universities. At the OpenInfra Days China event at the end of the year, a Kata Containers technology forum was held to look forward to the technical roadmap of Kata Containers 4.0.

In the past year, core developers from China have also completed Kata Containers’ spring course guidance at North Dakota State University as mentors, actively participating in the growth and development of the global community.

OpenInfra Days China

OpenInfra Days China 2023 was held in Beijing on December 1. It is an annual large-scale offline community event. The event attracted a total of 630 registrations, of which 464 came to participate in the annual technology event. This year's OpenInfra Days China covers LOKI, Cloud Infrastructure for AI, Sustainable Computing, Computing Force Network, Infrastructure Security and AI Ops. In addition to offline technology sharing, the keynote speeches of the conference activities are also conducted through the media of multiple online cooperative communities. The live broadcast had a total of more than 58,000 views.

The following is a map analysis of the participants:

Once more, OpenInfra Days China is awarded as one of the most popular technology events for developers

CFN Working Group

The CFN working group has been continuously advancing the work of the working group and setting up a version plan to output phased results in the past year. A total of 19 companies and organizations participated in the community work of the CFN working group. It created four technical repositories, with code contributions exceeding 724,000. At the same time, four task force teams were established, including architecture, general computing scheduling, computing force offloading and computing force cloud native. The CFN working group has also established a corresponding technical committee to improve technical guiding principles and improve community construction.

The CFN Working Group also hosted a technical forum on OpenInfra Days China 2023 to discuss the roadmap of the working group in 2024.

Cross-Community Collaborations

China's open source community will be very lively in 2023, with open source events happening one after another from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. The OpenInfra community has also had many in-depth exchanges with other open source communities this year. Our project has participated in community activities of CNCF, and OpenInfra foundation has also participated in grand gatherings of leading companies in China's open source industry, including Ant Group's Inclusion Conference, Huawei Connect, OpenAtom Foundation’s OpenEuler Technology Day, etc. At the same time, we were also invited to participate in the Open-source Foundation Forum on Kaiyuanshe‘s annual event, where we discussed open source governance with representatives from the Apache Foundation, Linux Foundation, and OpenAtom Foundation. These are the momentums that promote cross-community collaboration.

OpenInfra Foundation Membership Growth

The OpenInfra Foundation continues to see growth in worldwide organizations running and supporting open source communities who write software that runs in production. Our announcement of OpenInfra Asia and OpenInfra Europe regional hubs helped spur interest from Europe, China and Japan. We saw strong growth overall in Europe, SE Asia, South America and North America. Members around the world are joining the OpenInfra Foundation to build the next decade of open infrastructure:

• Twenty-two new member organizations from 10 separate countries and four continents, creating a 25% member growth for the Foundation
• Okestro upgraded from a Silver Member to a new Gold Member, showing strong growth in the South Korean market and seventeen organizations have joined as Silver Members with particular growth seen in South America, SE Asia and the United States
• Four Associate Members joined to support the mission of the OpenInfra Foundation
• Strategic growth areas emerged including confidential computing, OpenStack-powered public and private clouds, storage, digital sovereignty and regional policy initiatives.

The number of organizations running OpenInfra projects is increasing daily and we’re incredibly excited about opportunities to continue to grow Foundation membership into 2024 and beyond. If you would like to build the next decade of open infrastructure with us, get in touch with Jimmy McArthur!

OpenInfra Foundation Associate Members

OpenInfra Foundation Associate Membership is focused on recognizing the collaboration between the OpenInfra Foundation and other non-profit and research-oriented organizations. In 2023, we saw our list of associate members continue to grow and wanted to take this opportunity to introduce them.

• OpenEuler is the open source operating system for digital infrastructure and is supported by a diverse community
• Ersila is a tech non-profit organization that focuses on open source artificial intelligence.
• The Apereo Foundation works to support open source software used and created by education institutions worldwide.
• Valencia College is a public university based in Florida, and our collaboration is focused on involving more university students in open source projects and the OpenInfra community.

Global Expansion of OpenInfra User Groups

In 2023, we saw 2,448 new members join various user groups across the globe. 

In 2023, OpenInfra user groups around the globe held a total of 60 events that reached hundreds in their respective communities. Among those events were quite a few combined events, such as a FOSDEM meetup planned in collaboration between various community leaders in Europe and a collaborative meetup between the Korean and Indonesian groups. 

OpenInfra Project Updates

Each update was compiled by members of the open source communities supporting these OpenInfra projects.

Since becoming a pilot project in December 2017, Kata Containers has rapidly become a highly sought after & unique container runtime favored by enterprises, that enhances the security of container workloads in a lightweight virtual machine. In April of 2019, Kata Containers was the first OpenInfra Foundation pilot project to graduate, becoming an official open infrastructure project. In 2023, Kata Containers has been actively evolving in the field of container technology, aiming to improve security and performance in the realm of cloud infrastructure. 

Microsoft Partnership

The collaboration between Microsoft and Kata Containers, initiated during the announcement of Kata Containers support at KubeCon NA in 2022, has continued to flourish. Microsoft's growing involvement and contributions have consistently enhanced not only Microsoft's capabilities but also the broader open-source community.

At the OpenInfra Summit in June 2023, Canada, Microsoft's product managers, Michael Withrow and Amar Gowda, delivered an engaging and insightful keynote. They delineated Microsoft's utilization of Kata Containers and the joint endeavor, Confidential Containers, within Azure Kubernetes Service. The keynote emphasized the pivotal role of Kata Confidential Containers in augmenting security layers, underlining its significance for service providers and users alike. Microsoft's unwavering support for Kata Confidential Containers has notably catalyzed a surging demand for Kata support across diverse cloud service providers.

In November 2023, Kata Containers seized the momentum of heightened interest by securing a dedicated booth at KubeCon NA. This strategic presence provided a central hub for current users, prospective adopters, and those seeking more secure hosting solutions to engage with knowledgeable Kata community members. Visitors from various backgrounds, spanning curious academics to seasoned developers, startups to enterprises, converged at the booth, sparking enlightening conversations and fostering a palpable sense of community enthusiasm.

The booth's interactions led to promising collaborations and pivotal developments. For instance, inquiries regarding support for Kata Containers in TelOS—a security-hardened operating system tailored for Kubernetes—sparked a collaboration with the Sidero Labs community. This partnership facilitated the implementation of support for the `kata-deploy` installer within the TalOS operating system. The swift and enthusiastic response from the Sidero Labs community exemplifies the agility and dedication of collaborative efforts within the Kata Containers ecosystem. We eagerly anticipate further collaboration with the Sidero community, expressing profound gratitude for their enthusiastic response to community requests.

Architecture Committee

In 2023, the Architecture Committee (AC) underwent two election cycles, held in April and October. Presently, the AC chairs comprise:

• Fabiano Fidêncio (fidencio), Intel
• Fupan Li (lifupan), Ant Group
• Gerry Liu (jiangliu), Alibaba Cloud
• Greg Kurz (gkurz), Red Hat
• Peng Tao (bergwolf), Ant Group
• Samuel Ortiz (sameo), Rivos Inc
• Steve Horsman (stevenhorsman), IBM.

Their collective leadership ensures that Kata Containers remains dedicated to fostering open collaboration and pioneering innovations in container speed and security.

The committee's expansion underscores Kata Containers' steadfast commitment to inclusivity and diversity, aligning closely with our OpenInfra Foundation's ethos of open collaboration. This strategic enlargement ensures a broader spectrum of perspectives in critical decision-making processes. The infusion of fresh committee members brings diverse expertise, skills, and viewpoints to the forefront, bolstering our ability to navigate intricate technical discussions, steer the project's trajectory, and effectively tackle evolving challenges.

Amid growth, the AC faced new challenges as newly appointed chair Feng Wang relinquished his position during his initial term. This prompted a collective introspection within the community, leading to a refinement of expectations and guidelines for current and future AC chairs. As part of this introspection, the Architecture Committee charter was enhanced to delineate procedures in the event of an AC chair stepping down. These discussions facilitated a smoother transition when longtime AC chair Eric Ernst chose not to seek re-election during the H2 cycle. While we deeply regret Feng and Eric's departures, we express heartfelt gratitude for their invaluable contributions and extend our sincerest wishes for success in their future endeavors.

Looking ahead, the expanded AC is poised to play a pivotal role in charting the course for Kata Containers. Our focus remains on continuous innovation, sustainable growth, and fostering a thriving ecosystem.

University Outreach Program

The Kata community's commitment to nurturing the next generation of open-source contributors was exemplified through a strategic partnership with Boston University. The program aimed to foster collaboration and innovation while engaging students in a real-world open-source project within the containerization domain.

In the first half of 2023, Kata Containers initiated a semester-long collaboration with Boston University. Students were tasked with a hands-on project: further development of a Rust-based kata-deploy tool. This initiative aligned with Kata Containers' strategic shift from Golang to Rust for enhanced performance and efficiency.

In the second half of the year, Microsoft took the lead by joining with North Dakota State University for the semester to develop Kata Containers for Spark - an open-source framework for large-scale data processing and analytics. Microsoft engineers mentored NDSU students to enable Spark+Yarn to use Kata Containers to enable multi-tenant Spark deployments in order to address security concerns related to multiple Spark deployments sharing the same host. 

Participating students gained practical experience in working on an ongoing open-source project, honing their skills in Rust programming, containerization concepts, and collaborative software development practices. The collaboration encouraged active engagement within the Kata Containers community, fostering an environment of mentorship, knowledge sharing, and cross-disciplinary learning. The partnership with Boston University exemplifies Kata Containers' commitment to fostering academic-industry collaboration, bridging the gap between theoretical education and practical application in the tech industry. The semester-long program resulted in meaningful contributions to the development of the Rust-based kata-deploy tool, aligning with Kata Containers' evolution and technological advancements.

The Kata Containers community remains committed to nurturing such collaborations, recognizing the value of academia-industry synergy in driving innovation and shaping the future of containerization technologies, and will continue exploring further opportunities for engagement with universities and educational institutions to continue empowering the next generation of open-source contributors.

The project continues to cultivate an engaged, rapidly growing community as evidenced by 2023 contributor stats: 6 major/stable releases with 1,200 plus commits made by 123 authors from 16 unique organizations. The top five contributing companies include Intel, IBM, Red Hat, Alibaba & Ant Financial Group.

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

Since the founding of OpenInfra Labs, a joint project of the OpenInfra Foundation and the MOC Alliance, we have seen a story of innovation and experimentation. Software and ideas created in the Labs' context have often transitioned into models for running a production cloud or upstream projects.

For example, the Elastic Secure Infrastructure (ESI) project grew out of a research project and has transitioned into upstream Ironic and Ansible. It also significantly impacted how the production New England Research Cloud (NERC) and upstream OKD projects access the computing capacity they require.

The Operate First project successfully brought operational considerations to the forefront of cloud technology development. Its principles have been widely recognized and adopted in various cloud operations and formed the basis for the model used to create NERC.

The work of the Telemetry Working Group led to initiatives within the MOC Alliance, such as developing data-sharing agreements for logs and traces, where future projects aim at creating GDPR-compliant logs and traces. The ideas from this working group informed the Red Hat Collaboratory funding the AI for Cloud Ops project.

While OpenInfra Labs was archived at the end of 2023, the research-focused work of this pilot project will continue in the i-Scale Research Center that was recently funded by NSF, as a partnership between industry and research whose founding research institutions are Northeastern University and Boston University. The MOC Alliance workshop, the open attendance academic conference where the OpenInfra Labs collaboration was originally announced in 2020, continues to provide opportunities to focus on the applications of open source to research problems and the the transition from research to practice.

This year the OpenStack community brought forth yet another pair of on-time releases. Having reached the end of the alphabet last year with the Zed release, 2023 allowed us to start back at the beginning again.

Antelope - The 2023.1 release was nicknamed Antelope and will be the anchor point for the skip-level release upgrade process that was decided by the technical committee last year. This means that users can upgrade from 2023.1 (Antelope) to 2024.1 (Caracal) which is planned to be released in April of 2024. This is very exciting because it addresses long-standing requests for a slower release cadence, while still also satisfying those who prefer more rapid iteration. The more significant changes, per project, are outlined in the Antelope cycle highlights. Thank you to the over 600 contributors from 110 different organizations who worked together to bring Antelope to life! 

Bobcat - The 2023.2 release also came out this year with a focus on increased hardware enablement, enhanced security, and general improvements to functionality. The OpenStack community continues to concentrate on increasing satisfaction for users interacting with OpenStack clouds, public and private alike. Together the community collected details of the larger accomplishments into the Bobcat cycle highlights. Thank you to the over 580 contributors that made Bobcat possible!

Extended Maintenance Status Changes

In 2018 the resolution about extended maintenance (EM)  for stable branches specified the process for transitioning branches to end-of-life, allowing for a phase called extended maintenance where these branches are still open to receive backports, but without receiving official releases. In reality, most current EM branches are generally not maintained at all and create a false expectation for users and operators that these branches are in a state of maintenance from the project team and receiving things like backported fixes. This year, the Technical Committee has created a new process that removes the concept of an extended maintenance branch and as an extension of last year’s resolution around the Skip Level Upgrade Release Process, only SLURP releases are eligible for having an unmaintained branch. These new branches are being referred to as unmaintained because they are no long being officially maintained. This branch CAN still get backported fixes, etc, but there is no formal agreement by the community to do so. 

Technical Committee

Throughout the year there were two Technical Committee Elections that resulted as follows:

Bobcat Technical Committee Election Results

• Ghanshyam Mann
• Dan Smith
• Jay Faulkner, VIce Chair
• Dmitriy Rabotyagov
• Sławek Kapłoński
• Kristi Nikolla, Chair
• Brian Rosmaita
• Amy Marrich
• James Page

Caracal Technical Committee Election Results

• Ghanshyam Mann
• Dan Smith
• Jay Faulkner, Chair
• Sławek Kapłoński
• Kristi Nikolla
• Brian Rosmaita, Vice Chair
• Amy Marrich
• James Page
• Dr. Jens Harbott

We thank all of those that were elected, not just as Technical Committee members, but also as PTLs for helping to lead the OpenStack community.

Growing Footprint of OpenStack-Powered Clouds

In 2023, the OpenStack footprint has grown to 45 million compute cores powered by OpenStack running in production. While the growth is most notable among the world’s largest deployments, the growth continues to be seen across deployments of all sizes, regardless of industry and geography. 

A significant contributor to this is LINE, the Japanese messaging app that recently merged with Yahoo! Japan to form LY, whose OpenStack deployment grew from 4 million cores last year to 6.9 million cores this year. Large scale OpenStack user Workday also added another 800,000 cores and OVH reached the 1 million core threshold for the first time and its engineers say this growth is expected to continue. 

While not all deployments are cataloged in the OpenStack User Survey, new clouds continue to be reported. This year, 12% of the clouds came online within the past nine months highlighting that even 13 years in, OpenStack continues to be adopted to set up new public and private cloud infrastructure.

The 2023 OpenStack User Survey also uncovered new trends, including organizations with smaller teams have proven that a massive internal team is not required to operate an OpenStack cloud, recent releases are gaining traction highlighting community progress in improving upgrades, and the OpenStack footprint continues to grow both with new clouds coming online as well as growth among OpenStack deployments of all sizes. Additional 2023 data around OpenStack operator demographics, deployment decisions, and cloud size can be found on the OpenStack analytics dashboard. Organizations running OpenStack are encouraged to take the OpenStack User Survey so the OpenInfra Foundation and OpenStack community can better understand the global footprint and architectures. 

Find the OpenStack community:

• On the mailing list: https://lists.openstack.org/mailman3/lists/openstack-discuss.lists.openstack.org/
• Code: https://opendev.org/openstack
• Code reviews on https://review.opendev.org
• Website: https://openstack.org

OpenStack Certified Administrator (COA) Exam

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

In 2023,

• Ten OpenInfra Members continued to offer COA training, including 99Cloud, AWCloud, Btech, Canonical, CDAC, ComponentSoft, Red Hat, WhiteStack, Cleura, and Mirantis
• 128 students passed the exam, a 72% pass rate
• This was a 200% increase in geographical diversity compared 202

Among the exam takers, students were from 33 countries.

• Algeria
• Australia
• Brazil
• Burkina Faso
• Canada
• China
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• France
• Germany
• India
• Indonesia
• Italy
• Japan
• Kazakhstan
• Malaysia
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Philippines
• Poland
• Republic of Korea
• Rwanda
• Saudi Arabia
• Serbia and Montenegro
• Spain
• Sweden
• Thailand
• Uganda
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Venezuela
• Vietnam

StarlingX is an open source community that is supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. The project is a complete cloud infrastructure software stack for distributed systems suitable for use by the most demanding applications in industrial IoT, telecom, video delivery, and other ultra-low latency use cases at scale. The platform is an implementation of the LOKI stack, as it creates a fusion between well-known open source projects including the Linux kernel, OpenStack and Kubernetes.

The project celebrated its 5th anniversary in 2023. The community has put out eight releases since its inception, with StarlingX 8.0 being the latest stable release of the project. This version of the platform included new features in areas such as security, distributed cloud and more.

The community took on a big task to replace the base operating system in the platform from CentOS to Debian, by integrating an updated version of the Linux kernel, 5.10, while keeping all the real-time features and performance tuning intact. The 8.0 release finalized the migration and delivered the Debian-based platform with full functionality. A little after the 8.0 release, the community also stopped the periodic builds of the previous, CentOS-based version of the platform. With the source code being openly available, anyone can still build those images locally.

One of the new features of the platform is the ability to deploy infrastructure services for the All-In-One (AIO) deployment model on one CPU core. This allows dedicating most of the resources to application workloads at small sites, which is critical for many edge and IoT use cases. This feature is currently supported for Intel® 4th Generation Xeon® Scalable Processors or above.

The Backup and Restore feature was enhanced in the 8.0 release. Users of the platform can now choose to store a backup locally or on the centralized System Controller. The latter option has some limitations that prevent backing up the container image registry to the central location which avoids moving large files through the network.

The Precision Time Protocol implementation became more robust. The community extended the capabilities of this feature to be available for applications, so they now can access related events and status updates from the system, such as PTP lock state, clock class, GNSS status, OS clock sync status, as well as the overall sync health of a node they are running on. This functionality was previously only available for the infrastructure services. This feature is critical for workloads that depend on precise timing and must take immediate action when the synchronization state of their time source changes, for instance, 5G workloads.

Beyond the above, further features and enhancements in StarlingX 8.0 include:

• Upgrading to new versions of platform components, such as Kubernetes and OpenStack.
• Integrating SSH with remote Windows Active Directory
• Enhancing the Backup & Restore feature
• Adding support for Kubernetes Custom Configuration
• Implementing RBAC enhancements to StarlingX APIs and CLIs

In the second half of 2023, the StarlingX community started to work on the 9.0 release. During this release cycle, the community started to collaborate with new contributors from Arm and AMD to increase the diversity of hardware architectures that are supported by the platform. The work also includes building out lab infrastructure to continuously test the project on a diverse set of hardware platforms.

The community held two election cycles in 2023 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 were making as well as onboard newcomers to the project. There were presentations about the project at events such as the OpenInfra Summit and All Things Open, and contributors discussed technical details about the project at the two online Project Teams Gathering (PTG) events. StarlingX contributors ran a half-day-long workshop at the OpenInfra Summit to guide attendees through the deployment process for the platform. The community has also been exploring collaboration opportunities with other open source communities, such as the Open Compute Project's (OCP) openEDGE Subproject.

The project had over 2,951 changes committed by 181 authors and 11 organizations during the year.

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. Further, organizations are evaluating the platform for use cases such as backbone network infrastructure for railway systems and high-performance edge datacenter solutions. Managing forest fires is another new use case that has emerged and is being researched by a new StarlingX user and contributor.

The StarlingX code is hosted under the Apache 2 license. Learn about the project, and how to contribute and support the community at starlingx.io. Check out the code and join the community's channels to get involved:

• Code: opendev.org/starlingx
• Matrix: #starlingx:opendev.org
• Mailing list lists.starlingx.io

Zuul is an open source CI/CD platform designed for test-driven teams that need to gate against multiple projects and systems before landing a single patch. Zuul has found wide reach and can be found being used by software and hardware development teams building cloud, automotive, e-commerge, and more software.

The Zuul project published eight new versions in 2023, and Nodepool got five releases. This was the work of 29 individuals contributing more than 500 new changes to these systems.

Included in these releases are a number of improvements. One of the most visible to Zuul users is addition of Ansible 8 to the job runtime environment options. This meant Zuul supported the latest release of Ansible until the very end of 2023 when Ansible 9 was released.

Less visible but just as important are performance and security updates. Zuul received a number of performance improvements that ensure jobs start running more quickly and once running setup git repos as quickly as possible. In particular, a number of ZooKeeper interactions have been optimized to ensure Zuul is not doing unnecessary reads or writes. One major piece of this is a robust caching layer for ZooKeeper records in Zuul. The entire git repo setup routine for job workspaces has been rewritten to avoid unnecessary resets and branch setup. Now Zuul will do only what is necessary for repo setup which should result in quicker jobs particularly when disk I/O is a bottleneck. Nodepool has standardized its drivers on the statemachine framework. For the AWS and OpenStack drivers, this provided an immediate performance improvement due to the new framework simply working more efficiently. After the migration to the statemachine framework a number of additional performance improvements were made to the framework improving all of the drivers using the framework base. To improve security, Zuul's restricted Bubblewrap environment will now execute with user namespacing disabled if Bubblewrap and the Linux kernel support doing so. This removes what has become a common pathway to local privilege escalations within the Linux kernel.

In addition to updating the Ansible version used to execute jobs Zuul is providing new features to job writers. One set of features we're excited to see people take advantage of is the ability to detect job failures early using two different methods. The first relies on Zuul parsing Ansible's task statuses.

If a task in a job returns a failed status Zuul will identify the job as a failure early and begin to take action on that. Many jobs rely on long running tasks that may execute a number of nested steps for example in a Shell script or a nested Ansible playbook. In these cases Zuul doesn't recieve errors quickly. To handle these situations you can configure Zuul jobs to search for strings in streaming task output that indicates failure has occurred. Zuul can detect these failures before the tasks return explicit failure.

The Gerrit and GitHub drivers both received a number of improvements. They now both support automated detection of the default branch for repositories. Zuul now understands Gerrit's submit requirements system and won't try to merge changes that fail these requirements. The Gerrit driver has also grown support for submitWholeTopic, so that it automatically treats all changes within a topic as circular dependencies.

The Gerrit driver also supports being triggered through several Gerrit pubsub plugins (Kafka, Kineses, and Google Cloud). On the GitHub side, Zuul will now more accurately use a merge method that matches GitHub's by default. The GitHub driver will also fall back to a user token when configured as an application in cases where specific GitHub repos have not configured Zuul as an application. This increases GitHub API limits compared to anonymous requests and should make loading configs from Github quicker.

Zuul's web interface continues to improve. 2023 saw Zuul add a dark mode theme option to the web interface. ANSI color support has been added to console type output. Zuul's self reporting of configuration errors should be far more user friendly now. The errors are now structured providing information about the project, error type, error severity, and general help text. The web UI renders this in a paginated manner and collapses the configuration text by default. The end result is a much easier to navigate and understand error report.

There a number of less noticeable, but still very important improvements that have been made.

On top of general bugfixing a number of maintenance efforts have been made. Zuul upgraded SQLAlchemy to version 2 this year. The container images for Zuul projects were updated to Debian Bookworm (with one exception) and Python 3.11. The container image hosting moved from Docker Hub to Quay.io.

Zuul is also incredibly proud of its reliability record. The OpenDev Zuul deployment has been automatically upgraded once a week with zero downtime since the middle of 2022. Being able to sustain that week after week requires care from the Zuul maintainers to ensure that Zuul is as bug free as possible, that any faults that do occur degrade gracefully, and that Zuul is able to run with no single point of failure. This is quite the achivement when you consider all of the work that has occurred in the last year.

The Zuul project looks forward to 2024. There are a number of planned improvements we would like to see included in Zuul next year including dropping Ansible 6 and adding Ansible 9 support, migrating away from PCRE style regexes to libre2 regexes, splitting STDOUT and STDERR streams in Ansible command tasks for improved Ansible compatibility, incorporating nodepool functionality in Zuul, and refactoring the circular dependency system to make it fit into Zuul's model in a more native way.

The Zuul community has been active within the OpenInfra, Gerrit, Bazel, and Amazon communities giving presentations at OpenInfra Summit, Gerrit User Summit, Bazelcon and Re:Invent. Keep an eye out for Zuul in your commuity or at your local event in 2024.

If you are interested in learning more about Zuul, using Zuul or contributing to Zuul's 2024 TODO list please reach out to us. We would love to help get you started on your Zuul journey.

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

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.

Running OpenDev is a community effort. In 2023 we saw some contributors move on, and new contributors jump in to get involved. We would like to thank Ian Wienand for all of the help he provided over the years. We would also like to thank new contributors like Gene Kuo and Tony Breeds for being willing to step in and help out as the need arose. Without contributors like Gene, Ian and Tony we would not be able to continue running these services for our users.

For years we've known that we would need to migrate away from the barely maintained Mailman 2 mailing list system. On top of that, one of our Mailman 2 servers was the oldest server in our fleet, and this server was no longer able to reliably update itself and survive a reboot. This year we completed a migration of all mailing list domains to a new Mailman 3 server, deleted the old problematic Mailman 2 server, and have done multiple Mailman 3 upgrades to ensure we are running the latest version. In addition to migrating onto supported software, this move brings a number of new features to our mailing lists like proper indexing of threads for search and forum-like web interaction with mailing list threads.

Last year we built a lot of momentum around our ability to maintain and upgrade our Gerrit code review system. We carried that momentum into 2023, performing two more upgrades; one in April to upgrade Gerrit 3.6 to 3.7, and another in November to upgrade

Gerrit 3.7 to 3.8. In both cases, we were running the latest version of Gerrit for at least a week prior to Gerrit releasing the next version. Between Gerrit upgrades, we updated our base container image to one based on Debian Bookworm and updated our Java version thereto Java 17. We have also continued to contribute to the Gerrit project providing small updates to documentation as well as downstream testing of new releases. Our testing of the 3.9.0 release discovered a major fault shortly after the release was made. We reported this issue, and the Gerrit project was able to publish a 3.9.1 release to address it. The Gerrit 3.9 release series will be ready for us when we upgrade to it.

Zuul continues to be an important tool that we rely on to test all of the changes we make to our systems. We automatically deploy the latest version of Zuul from master on a weekly basis which gives us access to unreleased features. OpenDev effectively acts as a beta tester for Zuul users who consume Zuul releases. This benefits the Zuul project by building confidence in changes made prior to releases and benefits OpenDev as we get early access to features. Example features we've been able to get early access to include: Ansible 8 support, web UI dark mode, performance improvements to job git repo setup, and autodetection of git repo default branches.

Our Matrix home server has begun to see more utilization. The Zuul project was our first Matrix user. In 2023 the StarlingX project joined Zuul on Matrix and is now hosting eleven Matrix rooms on the OpenDev home server for project communication.

Behind the more visible work detailed above is a significant amount of general maintenance effort. We converted all of our Python services running in containers to new images based on Debian Bookworm and Python 3.11. Many servers were upgraded to the latest Ubuntu Jammy LTS release including our static fileserver fronting AFS volumes, the entire Gitea cluster, all Zuul Executors, all Zuul Mergers, several CI resource mirrors, and our Etherpad server. We also need to upgrade the services themselves. Gitea and Etherpad run modern releases of their software. Within our CI environments, we pruned old Fedora images and added new Debian Bookworm images. The Limestone cloud region was removed from Nodepool, and we saw the Linaro ARM64 cloud migrate from one hosting environment to another.

The end result is a suite of tools that enable people to come together and collaborate on open source software development. (INSERT GRAPHIC HERE) In 2023 our users pushed more than 100k change revisions, left nearly 200k comments to review those changes, and eventually gated and merged 27k changes.

2024 should see us continue to keep our services up to date, upgrade the servers they run on, and collaborate with adjacent communities in ways that are beneficial to both sides.

This is all possible through the work of our contributors. We would like to thank everyone who contributed in 2023 and encourage you to help out in 2024. If any of the work we have done sounds interesting to you, please reach out as there will be more of it in 2024.

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 University Partnership Program (UPP) 

This year we introduced the OpenInfra University Partnership Program. This program was created to house the collaborations the OpenInfra Foundation has been fostering with various universities focusing on getting more students involved in open source projects. The list of universities has slowly been growing over the last few years and we have reached a critical mass where it's important to call out the successes from these partnerships. 

We want to give a special thanks to North Dakota State University and Oregon State University who were the first two universities in this program to participate year after year in collaboration with the OpenInfra Foundation. Working with them gave us the scaffold to scale out our relationships with more universities and establish various models for collaboration. Today the OpenInfra Foundation also collaborates with Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University and Valencia College.

As part of this program, we are focused on trying to alleviate the vacuum of talent that we have heard about from a number of Foundation member companies. By getting more students into open source while they're still in university, they are able to make connections with contributors employed at OpenInfra Foundation member companies and are pre-boarded to those companies because they already have established experience in OpenInfra open source projects like OpenStack and Kata Containers. By being established contributors, they bring added value as new hires to companies looking to grow their open source teams. One effort in particular that we pursued this year was connecting a team of folks at Bloomberg to a group of students wrapping up their semester and approaching graduation. Students were able to learn about the opportunities available at Bloomberg, about the company culture and make connections with Bloomberg employees that could help with references. This is definitely something we will organize with interested member companies for every semester that we can in 2024.

Currently, all of the universities participating in this program are based in the United States but we hope to continue to grow the group in 2024, particularly into new regions like Europe, Central and South America and Asia.

• In 2023, the OpenInfra Foundation and the OpenStack community had the opportunity to partner with Carnegie Mellon and Professor Stephen Walli for the first time. Before the semester started, the OpenStack community prepared 6 proposals for Professor Walli to present to students taking part in the summer internship program. From May through August, the program ran with students getting real world, open source experience. Congratulations to the first students that were able to help us pilot this cooperation with Carnegie Mellon and the OpenInfra Foundation!

  • Jackson Daggett 
  • Sophia Witt 
  • Skyler Hu 
  • Anastasiia Runova 
  • Anvi Joshi 
  • Suyeon Cha 
  • Unn Seo Park (Grace) 
  • Yujia Zheng (Helen) 
  • Aarohi Kulkarni

• In 2023, the OpenInfra Foundation had the absolute pleasure of being introduced to Valencia College and beginning a collaboration. They were very excited to work with an open-source-focused foundation to enable their students to get more hands-on experience in open source projects with global communities. Professor Corey Leong kicked off collaboration by supporting an intern to work with the Skyline (a modern OpenStack dashboard) team throughout the semester. The student intern, Corei Parker, was able to understand what it means to be a part of a global community and work with people in other time zones during her work. Next year Professor Leong is planning both a hackathon day and also another internship for a student. Valencia College also became an associate member of the OpenInfra Foundation this year. This recognition of the collaboration between our organizations is exciting because it shows Valencia College's commitment to open source, open infrastructure and the potential opportunities for students.

• The OpenInfra Foundation also worked with two students at the Oregon State University’s (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL) in 2023. For most of the year, we worked with Antonia Gaete, mentored by Artem Goncharov and Stephen Finucane. Antonia’s contributions focused on closing the gaps in the Glance implementation in the openstackclient and the openstacksdk. This work is part of the larger overall goal of removing all project-specific clients. By implementing the Glance image service into the openstacksdk and the openstack client, OpenStack users will have a more uniform experience across all OpenStack services and, in turn, the glanceclient will one day be able to be deprecated in favor of the unified client. Toward the end of her internship, Antonia was able to help support Artem and Stephen in getting a new intern onboarded and ready to begin her contributions. Oria Weng is OSU’s new OSL intern that will be picking up where Antonia left off, closing up the gaps between the Glance client and the OpenStack client’s Glance support. We look forward to working more with her in the future and hope that Antonia will continue to contribute to OpenStack post-graduation.

• In collaboration with North Dakota State University, the OpenInfra Foundation was able to allow students to work on both OpenStack and Kata Containers. We had two proposals accepted by the professor and students.  Three students worked on OpenStack Manila, the file service, under the mentorship of three contributors: Gotham Patra Ravi, Carlos de Silva and Ashley Rodriguez. Notably, Ashley herself had previously gone through a similar mentorship during her education at Boston University so we want to give a special thanks to her for stepping up to be a mentor. Christopher Parks, Reynaldo Bontje and Samuel Loegering worked together with their mentors to continue closing the gaps between the Manilaclient and that has been implemented in the OpenStack SDK. The other group of students worked on Kata Containers with Treva Williams and James Hunt. The five students, Juaniaga Okugas, Maxwell Wendlandt, Alec Pemberton, Christopher Robinson and Gabe Venberg, worked on supporting a new Rust runtime and implementing Rust’s optional built-in sandbox functionality. Preparation for the next semester has already begun and we are again working to have project proposals from both OpenStack and Kata Containers for students at North Dakota State University.

Outreachy Internship Program

During the first Outreachy internship round of the year, the OpenStack community had three interns participating in two different projects. Toheeb Oyekola and Desire worked together with Sofia Enriquez from the Manila project to extend the automated validation of API reference/request response samples. Meanwhile, Clifford Emeka worked on implementing metadata for Manila share export locations with the help of both Carlos da Silva and Ashley Rodriguez. 

The second internship round of the year recently kicked off in early December and has two interns working with two different mentors on two different projects. Jon Bernard is mentoring Premlata on continuing to close the OpenStackClient gaps for Cinder. Melaku Alehegn is the second intern we are welcoming into the community, under the mentorship of Goutham Pacha Ravi. Together they are helping Melaku work on supporting new Manila API features in the OpenStack Dashboard.  

Former Outreachy intern, Mahnoor Ashgar, who interned during the December 2021 round, was hired by Red Hat this year. She is now working on the OpenShift Metal Platform team doing 100% upstream Ironic work since she started!

The OpenInfra Foundation looks forward to continuing to support the Outreachy Program and the Software Freedom Conservancy on their mission to make the world of open source a more diverse place! Also, special thanks to Dmitry Tantsur and Mahati Chamarthy for representing OpenStack and coordinating these internships with Outreachy.

OpenInfra Events

OpenInfra Summit

In 2023, the OpenInfra Foundation hosted the 22nd in-person OpenInfra Summit in Vancouver, British Columbia. Attendees from 50 countries and 335 organizations gathered to discuss the latest trends in open infrastructure with 45% attending an OpenInfra Summit for the first time. 

The schedule as well as the keynotes highlighted the latest open source trends, zeroing in on confidential computing, AI and LOKI - the OpenInfra Standard (Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes Infrastructure). 

Highlights include: 

• The StarlingX community celebrated its 5th anniversary! In fact, the project — the open source distributed cloud platform optimized for low-latency and high-performance applications — was announced on the keynote stage in Vancouver, BC, Canada, five years ago. 
• John Dickinson of NVIDIA shared that AI and ML are taking off like a rocket, and the fuel powering that rocket engine is data. The job of storage providers is to put as much data into the engine as quickly as possible. NVIDIA shared how it is using OpenStack Swift to give users a way to explore massive AI and ML datasets without needing to worry about the underlying storage.
• Microsoft shared how it’s using Kata Containers and Kata Confidential Containers in Azure Kubernetes Service to achieve zero trust operator deployments.  
• Ant Group, one of the founders of the Kata Containers project, gave a live demonstration, demystifying confidential computing by showing how a large-language model application such as LLaMA can be run in confidential containers. 
• Bloomberg, an OpenStack user since 2013 and an OpenInfra Foundation Gold Member, won the Superuser Award! 

For more highlights, check out these Superuser articles to catch the latest advancements and innovations from the global OpenInfra community: 

• OpenInfra Summit Vancouver Recap: 50 Things You Need to Know
• Container Security Highlights
• CI/CD Highlights
• NFV & Edge Computing Highlights
• AI, ML, & HPC Highlights
• Public, Private, & Hybrid Cloud Highlights

Project Teams Gathering (PTG)

For the first PTG in 2023, the OpenInfra Foundation hosted 35 open source teams at the OpenInfra Summit Vancouver and supported them in discussing the future, reviewing feedback on recent releases, and collaborating with one another. Over 85 organizations were represented by more than 260 registrants that participated in team discussions.

Also during this event, there was a focus on operator feedback, particularly with regards to OpenStack. Ten OpenStack specific teams hosted operator hours in an effort to engage with more operators and get more feedback that wasn’t captured by the user survey. A number of the teams had success with gathering more feedback from operators but it is something the OpenStack community wants to do more of in the future.    

The second PTG, held virtually, had even more teams participating with a grand total of 43 teams gathering to collaborate. Making up these 43 teams were, again, over 250 registrants. This PTG hosted a variety of OpenInfra teams such as StarlingX and Kata Containers, but we were also delighted to host a open source community from a different foundation - Confidential Containers (CoCo). In the future we hope to include more adjacent communities like CoCo to better support cross community collaboration.

OpenInfra Days & Cloud Operator Days

In 2023, the OpenInfra Community gathered for five various OpenInfra Days in Korea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Japan, and the United States. These events spanned one to three days and covered topics including high performance and cloud computing, advanced networking, storage and observability with management and more. OpenInfra Days in 2023 attracted a total of 1,862 in-person participants and thousands of online attendees. OpenInfra Days Korea also included parallel open source communities including the Cloud Native, OCP and Ceph communities.

The OpenInfra Days that took place in 2023 include:

• OpenInfra Days China
• OpenInfra Community Days Korea 2023
• OpenInfra Days Democratic Republic of Congo
• OpenInfra Days North Carolina
• Cloud Operator Days Tokyo

OpenInfra Live

In March of 2021, the OpenInfra Foundation introduced OpenInfra Live, an interactive series covering all things OpenInfra, streaming to YouTube and LinkedIn as well as being posted to WeChat. To date, the OpenInfra Foundation has produced over 60 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 is the “Large Scale Ops Deep Dive” where a panel of OpenStack operators invite guests to discuss their deployment and operations. In these episodes, a panel of operators interview 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 2023 include Ubisoft, Samsung SDS, and NIPA Cloud. 

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 Special Interest Groups (SIGs) & Working Groups

Large Scale SIG

The Large Scale SIG aims to facilitate running OpenStack at large scale, answer questions that OpenStack operators have as they need to scale up and scale out, and help address some of the limitations operators encounter in large OpenStack clusters. During 2023 we continued to improve our documentation and produced four episodes of our popular show on OpenInfra Live, where operators of large deployments discuss between peers the joys and challenges of running OpenStack at a massive scale. Check out the episodes with Ubisoft, Société Générale, NIPA Cloud, and Samsung SDS! And if you are interested in sharing your large scale story, please reach out to us!

Collaborating without Boundaries Working Group

In 2024, The Collaborating with Out Boundaries Working Group was developed to address issues communities are facing like training, keeping talent local, building infrastructure in regions where none exists and only having a single non-local, cloud solution. This working group established an opportunity to level the playing field through open collaboration, creating a unified place for groups to work together and share knowledge around solving these problems through open infrastructure, open connectivity, microtransactions, and technology training programs. 

This year the group held two meetings in the second half of the year. The Korean OpenInfra user group discussed their collaboration with universities to provide training and career growth opportunities for students. The second meeting introduced the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and talked about the collaborative work they are doing including CHPC’s role as an HPC centre and collaboration with academics, and their journey towards cloud and human capital development initiatives.

Diversity & Inclusion Working Group

The Diversity and Inclusion Working Group continued reaching out to the OpenInfra Foundation 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. Since the return to in-person, there has been good participation at the Vancouver Summit, particularly for the Speed Mentoring event Sponsored by Red Hat and the Diversity lunch sponsored by Bloomberg.

Some key highlights of the year were:

• An updated version of the Code of Conduct (CoC) was approved by Legal and the OpenInfra Board. This new version combined the previous events and community CoC and had additional examples of concerns added for clarity.
• A new version of the Diversity and Inclusion Survey, which is inclusive of all OpenInfra Projects, was announced during the OpenInfra Summit Keynotes
• An updated charter was approved by the board, reflecting the foundation's new name and expanding the group's scope to cover all OpenInfra Projects
• A page for Diversity was added to the OpenInfra Foundation website, replacing the outdated Wiki page previously used by the Working Group

In 2024, we plan on continuing to aid the OpenInfra Foundation projects in their efforts to remove divisive language and to use more inclusive terminology. We also plan on continuing our efforts with the community during virtual and in-person events.

Interop Working Group

The priority of the Interop Working Group in 2023 was driving the discussion about more appropriate ways of running interoperability tests, not only from the toolkit’s standpoint but also from the nature of the tests involved.

We initiated these discussions after getting feedback from users that the tests that were part of the interoperability program weren’t testing interoperability to the extent they expected. We concluded that in this article where we also summarized the historical reasons that led to the state of the program as we knew it.

In the aforementioned article, we also drafted the direction interoperability testing could take going forward. We also partially covered that during the last PTG. As that didn’t get any traction - no one expressed interest in that, we have to conclude that there is no longer an interest in interoperability testing.

Taking into consideration that interoperability testing isn’t a significant priority at the moment, maintaining refstack as well as refstack-client together with the interop guidelines requires maintenance work that outweighs the benefits. Therefore, we decided to retire openinfra/interop, openinfra/refstack and openinfra/refstack-client projects in the next year.

As you know, interoperability testing was only one of the two use cases of interop and adjacent projects. The other use case was the trademark policy (namely, the “Powered by” trademark) that was granted to those vendors who passed the tests according to the recent guidelines defined in openinfra/interop - a copy of a RefStack log run was required as the additional technical requirement.

It is expected that the trademark policy will be revised in 2024 Q1 so that the additional technical requirement, previously provided by Interop, will not be required for granting the use of a trademark.

Media Relations & 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 OpenInfra Foundation and for its supported projects. Check out recent community news highlights. All news announcements are distributed by newswire and email and posted to the appropriate OpenInfra 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 OpenInfra community newsletter.  

Key announcements this year included the following: 

• OpenInfra Summit Vancouver 2023 Schedule Published (February)
• New Associate Members—Rust and Python Foundations (March)
• Longtime Leaders at the Open Infrastructure Foundation Move into VP Roles (April)
• OpenInfra Foundation Launches Regional Hubs in Asia, Europe (June)
• Okestro Joins OpenInfra Foundation as Gold Member (June)
• Bloomberg Wins Superuser Award (June)
• OpenInfra Europe Seats Its First Board (October)
• OpenInfra Asia Seats Its First Board (November)
• OpenInfra Foundation Announces 2024 Events (December)

In addition, several projects announced significant milestones: 

• OpenStack Antelope (March)
• OpenStack Bobcat (October)
• StarlingX 8.0 (February)
• StarlingX’s 5th Birthday (April)

Analysis of global coverage of online, print and podcasts in 2023 indicates that the OpenInfra Foundation and its supported projects received more than 15,869 mentions. Media coverage was distributed globally: North America, Asia Pacific and Europe regions had the highest number of mentions (in that order), with coverage extending to Africa, Australia, the Middle East and South America as well.

OpenInfra Foundation Marketing Channels

OpenInfra Newsletter

The Open Infrastructure Community Newsletter regularly shares the latest developments and activities across open infrastructure projects events and users supported by the OpenInfra Foundation. The newsletters are sent out to the community through email. In 2023, 10 OpenInfra Newsletters were sent and read over 133,000 times. See all the news from 2023!

Looking forward to 2024, 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 project 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.

This year, the OpenInfra Foundation reached over 418,000 followers on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. 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.

The OpenInfra regional hubs joined LinkedIn, so you can now follow the latest news from OpenInfra Europe and OpenInfra Asia.