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

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

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

and…

More code!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full 2021 OpenInfra Annual Report here!