Mohammed NaserThe OpenInfra Live Keynotes happened over two days, organized by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Here is a recap of Day 2 of the events.
The OpenInfra Live Keynotes, a two-day special online event celebrating the best in open source infrastructure, has just ended with a lot of exciting announcements and amidst much fanfare. Yesterday we saw the events of Day 1 and gave you a recap of the same.
The two-day special edition of OpenInfra Live allows the community to meet the latest players of the OpenInfra space, interact with teams behind the LOKI stack (we love the new terminology), and more, and gain insights into how open source technologies shape the public cloud economics of today. As a Supporting Sponsor of the event, team VEXXHOST is happy to see all the growth around and be a part of the global infra revolution. Without further ado, let's get to the recap of Day 2.
State of OpenInfra - Globally and in China
As with yesterday, Day 2 of the OpenInfra Live Keynotes kicked off with a session on the 'State of OpenInfra' from OpenInfra Foundation's Vice President of Engineering, Thierry Carrez. Thierry mentioned that the past decade of OpenInfra, beginning with OpenStack 11 years ago, was a time of pioneering and growth. However, the next decade is about getting these infrastructure solutions everywhere, with more projects, adoption, and innovation.
In just the past 18 months, more than 100 new OpenStack public clouds of all sizes have been deployed. Over 80% of all deployments are in production, spanning all the industry verticals such as telecom, financial services, research, manufacturing, and more. Furthermore, Theirry noted that Kata Containers are now becoming industry standard for running secure containerized workloads and that the majority of adopters use it along with Kubernetes. Airship is also seeing increased adoption, and the same goes for StarlingX in terms of edge use cases.
The CICD project Zuul is also witnessing tremendous growth, with 69% usage in production.
After Theirry's insights, Haoyang Li, Community Manager of the Foundation in China, presented on the State of OpenInfra in China. For OpenStack's Xena release, the country had 62 contributors. China is now the second most active country in the platform's development, including 70% OpenStack deployment in production across industries such as academic research, finance, IT, and telecom. Among the 25 million-plus OpenStack cores globally, telecom giant China Mobile alone has over 6 million CPU cores in production. In fact, nine out of the top 10 telecoms in the world are now running OpenStack.
Furthermore, the OpenInfra Days event happened in Beijing in October this year, with 800 attendees in person and 100,000 attending virtually. Haoyang also mentioned the WeChat group and public account with thousands of members where the OpenInfra community in the country discuss, contribute, and share things related to the topic. Finally, Taibai, the latest addition to OpenInfraLabs, stands as an example of more acceptance and contribution to open sourcing from China.
Cloud Spending and Public Cloud Momentum
After the session on the state of OpenInfra, Jonathan Bryce Mark Collier talked to Martin Casado about the topic 'Diving into the Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox.' Martin shared his insights on how public cloud companies are comparatively a new phenomenon even though the cloud has been in existence for a while. In a recent study conducted by Martin and a colleague, they looked at the clouds of 50 companies, and their Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) came up to 50% of overall expenditure. For these companies, reducing the cloud spend by 50% through methods like optimization cloud can bring the costs by $100 billion overall. Reducing cloud spending is actually a tool for growth. For companies searching for clouds, considering niche clouds focused on optimization rather than unsteady, giant clouds will be a better strategy, Martin says.
Moving on, Jimmy McArthur of the Foundation talked to Johan Christenson of City Network Victor Souza of Binero in Sweden regarding the 'OpenStack Powered Public Cloud Momentum.' With a focus on Sweden, they mentioned that OpenStack public cloud is growing well in the country, with the primary drivers being political aspects. Since there are several laws governing cloud environments, companies need alternative solutions to traditional architecture, and OpenStack gives the transparency to do that. Through open source, companies are now cooperating instead of competing. Also, open source tech is a tool for smaller companies to take on hyperscalers. Additionally, the governments in Scandinavia are not only supporting open source but are also actively adopting it.
SuperUser Award 2021
The Superuser Awards were launched in 2014 to honor organizations that make a real-world difference using the capabilities of open infrastructure. During the Denver Summit in 2019, VEXXHOST won the Superuser Award in recognition of our outstanding contributions to OpenStack-based infrastructure from the second release of the platform, Bexar.
At the OpenInfra Live Keynotes session, Sunny Cai of the OpenInfra Foundation announced the Superuser Award winner of 2021 from among 11 nominees, the most number of nominations since the inception of the Awards.
And the award goes to… Yahoo!
Team VEXXHOST congratulates Yahoo! and all other nominees this year on their stellar work in taking the open infrastructure revolution forward. Together, we can achieve great things for the advancement of the world as contributing members of a global, open source community.
Time for OpenSnacks - Zuul, Airship, and More!
Continuing on the two-day series titled OpenSnacks, where community members give insights on how to contribute to open source projects, Ashlee Ferguson, Community Manager at the Foundation, talked about 'How to Contribute to Airship.' The tool helps with repeated, automated cloud provisioning and lifecycle management. Airship has a new release this year - Airship 2.0 - capable of executing a more comprehensive range of tasks than its predecessor. To contribute to the platform, users can attend weekly designer calls, complete the user survey, join the mailing list, and more - all the information can be found in the developer guide.
Furthermore, OpenSnacks were given during the sessions on StarlingX, Kata containers, Zuul, and Magma. Greg Waines spoke about 'How to Contribute to StarlingX.' The platform is a fully managed, integrated, and ready to deploy Kubernetes-OpenStack solution. The applications of it can be seen widely now in far edge networks of major telecom providers. The information on how to contribute can be found in the developer guide, including joining the mailing lists, meetings, following social media communities, etc.
Later, Ildiko Vansca spoke with a panel including Andy Dunkin, Muhammed Gil, and John McCready on 'Deploying vRAN and OpenRAN with StarlingX.' They touched upon points such as how 5G brings in many requirements and how the flexibility and community for the solutions drive innovation and help meet the customers' demands and improve research capabilities.
Jim Blair gave insights on 'Zuul in Hybrid Environments.' The CICD framework is hybrid and multi-cloud-capable and helps with project gating and cross-project dependencies. Zuul has upcoming v4 and v5 releases, and Jim mentioned that v5 would be a real milestone.
The Foundation's Sunny Cai spoke with Tao Peng of Ant Group on 'Kata Containers in Production.' As an open source container runtime, it builds lightweight virtual machines that seamlessly plug into the container ecosystem. They also spoke about how to contribute to the Kata Containers community.
Allison Price of the Foundation, in conversation with the CTO of BRCK, Reg Orton, discussed the topic 'Connecting Africa to the Internet: How BRCK is running Magma in Production.' As an open source tool, it helps build carrier-grade networks. The goal of the project now is to bring connectivity to the next billion people. Using real-world insights, Magma allows users to use distributed market centers to their full potential with affordable connectivity. Later, Shubham Tatvamasi of Delhi University presented an OpenSnack on 'How to Contribute to Magma' and encouraged users to join the community and contribute.
Additional Sessions at the OpenInfra Live Keynotes
Day two of the OpenInfra Live Keynotes also saw many other sessions. Here is a quick look at the topics:
- Kyle Davis spoke about 'A Little about the OpenSearch Community,' mentioning that the platform has driven open source search and works as an analytics suite. It has a wide range of use cases, including testing and building software.
- Allison Price spoke with Meltem Kocabaş of Trendyol on 'Hybrid Cloud in Production.'
- Kendall Nelson spoke with Alex Song, contributor at OpenStack Cyborg, on 'Hardware Enablement Advancements in OpenStack Cyborg.' Previously known as Nomad, the platform works as an accelerator for resources, including GPUs, SSDs, etc.
- Jimmy Mcarthur joined a panel including Peter Pouliot, Laurent Bernou-Mazars, Zac Smith, and John Miranda on 'Tackling Sustainability with Eco-friendly, Green Hardware.' The panelists spoke about how the green computing movement can drive more change in the current world and make a substantial impact.
- Mr. Duan Xiaodong China Mobile's Strategy on the Next Generation Network and Open Source
Onward to the Berlin Summit 2022!
Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier wrapped up the two-day OpenInfra Live Keynotes with a short Q&A session with some speakers. They invited everyone in the community to attend the upcoming Berlin OpenInfra Summit. They presented a fun little video of the community in Berlin already preparing for the event and a member called Nils traveling to Berlin and declaring “I love it!” at every possible opportunity. Team VEXXHOST hopes and looks forward to seeing all of you there!
VEXXHOST as a Member of the OpenInfra Community
VEXXHOST was a Corporate Member of the OpenStack Foundation for many years. Our association with the OpenStack community began in 2011, and we've been a part of the journey so far as avid contributors and users. We are now a Founding Silver Member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation and help accompany it to new heights of open source development.
As a reputed IaaS provider, we ensure that our clients get the best cloud solutions. At VEXXHOST, we provide cloud solutions for a multitude of clients worldwide. We provide OpenStack-based clouds, including public clouds and dedicated and highly secure private cloud environments, ensuring utmost security and agility.
Take advantage of our limited-time deal just to set up a one-time, OpenStack-based private cloud deployment - at 50% off! The cloud will be running on the latest OpenStack release, Wallaby, which allows you to run Kubernetes and VMs in the same environment, and can be deployed in your own data centers with your hardware. Furthermore, all these will be deployed and tested in under a month!
What are you waiting for? Learn more!