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 Shanghai summit included Kubernetes, Project Airshift, rating and billing and security. Our team were on the ground in China to report on these topics and much more first hand.
Global Collaboration Driving Innovation
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, opened the summit by discussing how innovation in open source communities—specifically OpenStack which is one of the 3 largest open source projects—is closing the innovation gap in a global market that is valuated at over $12 billion USD. 451 research predicts a 36% growth in OpenStack adoption in the APAC region alone by 2023. Openstack is now powering over 70 public cloud offerings, including vScaler.
“Today, OpenStack is the standard for Open source Cloud infrastructure, with more than 10,000,000 compute cores running within OpenStack Cloud”
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.
PROJECT AIRSHIP
Airship is a collection of open source tools for automating cloud provisioning and management. Airship provides a declarative framework for defining and managing the life cycle of open infrastructure tools and the underlying hardware. These tools include OpenStack for virtual machines, Kubernetes for container orchestration, and MaaS for bare metal, with planned support for OpenStack Ironic.
Airship has exited the pilot phase and has been confirmed by the OpenStack Foundation as an official project, with Airship 2.0 planned for release in 2020, promising to drive the network evolution for 5G.
FROM 1.0 to 2.0
Airship 1.0 dramatically improved the way we provision and manage the infrastructure. Navigating through the journey towards Airship 1.0 release, we have learned many lessons. To address some of the lessons learned with Airship 1.0, Airship 2.0 has the following goals:
- Supporting Smaller deployments and Optimize support for use cases like edge cloud, connected car.
- Adoption of entrenched upstream projects – re-focus on Airship core competencies by leveraging other open source projects where appropriate. Embrace the cluster-API to support a wide array of deployment use cases.
- Vanishing complexity – with an ephemeral undercloud, the control plane is reduced so that there are no long-lived resources. It removes the challenge of upgrading the infrastructure while the workflow itself is being upgraded
- Increase visibility into what is taking place and what has failed. Issues in deployment lifecycle are easily exposed for user’s awareness directly via kubernetes objects, e.g. machine deployment failures can be seen by looking directly at machine objects.
“Airship is a powerful project that enables you to easily design repeatable infrastructure”. Mark Collier, COO, OpenStack Foundation.
KUBERNETES USE CASE AT CERN
Kubernetes featured in multiple talks at the summit, playing no small part in most OpenStack deployments, including CERN. Tim Bell, Leader of the Compute and Monitoring group of IT Dept. at CERN, discussed how the research facility is currenlty using 300k cores under an OpenStack cloud.
One of CERN’s key focuses in recent years has been how to provide an easy Kubernetes-as-a-Service infrastructure on top of OpenStack. In order to achieve this, CERN utilised the Magnum project and as a result it now has over 500 different kubernetes clusters running on top of its cloud.
In conjunction with Kubernetes, CERN uses the bare metal service Ironic, to register all servers within the infrastructure, which currently stands at apprcximatley 4,000 machines, and growing to 15,000 over the next 12 months.
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!