Over the last few years, we’ve been steering our Foundation through a series of transitions to align with the evolution of our community and the changing landscape of open source and cloud. This started in 2017 with an evaluation of strategic focus areas where we wanted to play a part in developing open source solutions. In 2018, we developed our pilot project program with Kata Containers, Zuul, Airship and StarlingX. These projects went through the confirmation process with the Board in 2019 and demonstrated their success in building communities that were delivering software consistently through open development.

Then, in 2020 it was encouraging to see the Board, staff and community come together to deliver a successful and pivotal year for the Foundation despite the challenges of a global pandemic. We came together and persevered to continue the transition, officially becoming the Open Infrastructure Foundation in October 2020. 

While the global community was not able to meet in person, everyone still convened to discuss how we collaborate to deliver the OpenInfra mission: building communities who write software that runs in production. We saw users who have been around for years talk about their growing OpenStack production deployments like Workday, LINE, and CERN, as well as new users talk about how they’re running other open source projects in production like Ant Group using Kata Containers, Verizon running StarlingX, and Volvo running Zuul for their autonomous driving software. 

We also celebrated multiple OpenInfra software releases that continued to develop through online events like the Project Teams Gathering (PTG) and endless asynchronous meetings. Our upstream communities continue to prioritize features enhancing integration with other open source projects, delivering the requirements from operators running production deployments. With OpenStack Ussuri and Victoria, StarlingX 4.0, Kata Containers 2.0, and seven releases from the Zuul developer community, users are continuing to see integration improvements with technologies like Kubernetes, Prometheus, QEMU, and Ansible. 

The work is not done. Together with the 60 organizations who joined the launch of the OpenInfra Foundation and over 110,000 community members, we are starting the next decade of open infrastructure tackling challenges including hardware diversification, deployment diversification, government regulations like data sovereignty, and the availability of more open source than ever. 

I am confident with the learnings of the past ten years and the momentum behind the OpenInfra mission, the next decade will see more innovation, collaboration, and open source software running in production. 

Want to be a part of the next decade of open infrastructure? Join us!