Twice a year, community members from more than 60 countries and 1000 companies gather to share OpenStack use cases, perform live software demos and hold free workshops and training. The Summit is a unique opportunity for members of open source communities to meet, exchange ideas and collaborate with each other. Key themes from this year’s US summit included 5G, Kata Containers and Ironic Bare Metal. In this summary newsletter, we bring you the latest news and announcements from the Denver Summit.
COLLABORATION WITHOUT BOUNDARIES
One of the key themes of the Summit covered in the keynote by OpenStack Foundation (OSF) Executive Director Jonathan Bryce was collaboration, and more specifically – collaboration without boundaries.
“We are stronger and innovate faster when we work and collaborate together to meet the needs of the OpenStack community”
– which is why the summits are designed to be an enabler of this collaboration.
According to Bryce “Open source is not a marketing initiative, and it’s not a business model on its own. It’s really an innovation philosophy.”
And it’s a philosophy that hundreds of companies, across broad industries are following – using the software to improve and enhance services for very varied workloads – and further emphasising a collaborative commitment to the opensource community. This open collaboration is a powerful force for driving technology to change our lives and our world.
KATA CONTAINERSTM AND ZUUL
OSF announces the first pilot projects confirmed as Top-Level ‘Open Infrastructure Projects
At the Summit, the OSF board of directors announced that the pilot project Kata Containers™ and the Zuul project gating system have become the first top-level Open Infrastructure Projects at the OpenStack Foundation, meaning in short that the OSF is committed to continue supporting it.
Kata Containers offers the ability to run container management tools directly on bare metal without sacrificing workload isolation. When compared to running containers on virtualised infrastructure the benefits of Kata containers include increased performance, faster boot time and cost efficiencies.
Zuul uses project gating to automate continuous integration, delivery and deployment of interrelated software projects in a secure manner while delivering sophisticated project gating, especially in scenarios involving multiple repositories with integrated deliverables.
“Kata Containers and Zuul are two exciting, highly useful software projects that are solving real-world problems for users by delivering production infrastructure with open source components”. Allison Randal, board member, OpenStack Foundation.
For additional information, read the press release.
OPENSTACK IRONIC BARE METAL
Continuing on the topic of top-level OpenStack projects, OSF announced it is expanding its Ironic bare metal program. The program is being hailed as a way for organisations to deploy and manage cloud resources on physical hardware.
In the past, deployment and management of virtualised compute resources, via the Nova project, was the primary use case, however, more recently a strong use case has emerged for organisations that want to directly manage and deploy cloud resources onto bare metal hardware.
Cloud computing can be described as serverless functions on top of containers on top of virtualisation, but of course, at the bottom of every stack is physical hardware that has an entire lifecycle itself that needs to be managed – which is where Ironic comes in.
The OpenStack Foundation is now promoting Ironic as part of an effort to boost adoption with multiple demonstrations of bare metal deployments which were showcased at the event. OpenStack Ironic is managing millions of compute cores all over the world, at organisations like Verizon and CERN. With 24% of production deployments now relying on it, it’s clear that Ironic is gaining serious momentum.
This is why we created Ironic: to provide a vendor-neutral API enabling data center operators to reliably manage infrastructure at scale, whether they need VMs or bare metal – Julia Kreger OpenStack Ironic Project Team Lead
For more information visit Openstack.org/baremetal
OPENDEV
A new project named OpenDev was also announced as a space for collaborative Open Source software development – the ‘OpenStack way’. OpenDev’s mission is to provide project hosting, continuous integration tooling, and virtual collaboration spaces for Open Source software projects.
Following on from the theme of collaboration without borders, Bryce believes that if open source is to flourish it needs open tools that can be used to build the next generation of software. OpenDev itself is run like an open source project, and anyone can join in and help run the system. Additionally, all of the services it runs are open source software themselves.
For more information visit www.opendev.org
5G and edge computing use cases
Open source software such as OpenStack is powering 5G and edge computing deployments, giving telecoms and non-IT industries the capacity to deploy and scale quickly while providing the flexibility needed for continuous innovations.
5G was an integral topic at the Summit with teams from both Ericsson and AT&T showcasing 5G deployments on containerized, OpenStack clouds The telecoms titans demonstrated their 5G technologies with a mmWave bandwidth of the 5G radio technology showcasing how the 39 GHz band New Radio (NR) network is capable of achieving more than 1 Gbps of throughput.
For more information, read the press release
OPENSTACK TRAIN
While the Open Infrastructure Summit content focuses on the broader world of cloud development, the core OpenStack platform itself was also a topic of discussion. With the latest release, ‘Stein’ now being confirmed as stable, the next major release of the core OpenStack cloud platform was announced, code-named ‘Train’ – set for general availability in October.
“I think that we’re going to continue to see the focus on automated operations and further efforts for container integration,” he said. “We’ll also be working hard to make sure that the way OpenStack Train is developed doesn’t break other projects, and vice versa.” Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation
For more information, visit releases.openstack.org/index.html
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For more information on any of the topics covered in our OpenInfrastructure Summit Summary or to discuss the vScaler cloud platform and how it can revolutionise your infrastructure, accelerate your research or start you on your digital transformation journey, please get in touch!