OpenInfra Summit: Opening up the cloud together – a report from Berlin

From June 7th to 9th, 2022, the meeting of the Open Infrastructure Community will take place in Berlin, for the first time since 2019. Heise is on site.

From June 7th to 9th, 2022, the OpenInfra Foundation invites you to its house conference in Berlin – for the first time in over two years as a face-to-face event. The community last met in Shanghai in 2019. Around 1,000 participants accepted the invitation and can gather interesting new information and ideas from 100 presentations on eleven different topics.

The Foundation is also celebrating its tenth anniversary. As a reminder, today’s OpenInfra Foundation previously operated under the name OpenStack Foundation. The new organization was launched in 2020, including the name change and the expansion of the thematic focus.

The opening keynote was less technical than usual and was themed “We are getting the job done” (roughly translated: We implement it). Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier – CEO and COO of the Foundation – offered a look back and at the same time looked forward: The audience learned from the numbers and data they brought with them that over 8,000 developers are contributing to open source infrastructure software. The result (as of June 2022) is around 25 million CPU cores worldwide, which are now running OpenStack software. Collier put the current economic potential of the cloud market at almost 8 billion US dollars.

Cloud with room for improvement and OpenStack on the up

According to him, in April 2022 the CEO of Amazon Andy Jassy said that 95 percent of global IT spending does not take place in the public cloud, but for on-premises installations (“95% of the world’s IT spend is on premises and not in the cloud”). The OpenInfra team therefore believes that there is still potential for growth here. In other words: According to them, after more than ten years, the mission of the Foundation is far from over. Mark Collier also showed a bar chart that shows AWS as the number one in the cloud environment with a market share of 33 percent. A collective entry “Others” followed in second place with 27 percent. This consists of over 180 OpenStack installations from various companies, including Vexxhost, Deutsche Telekom Open Cloud, Cleura, OVH, Nipa Cloud, China Unicom, China Telecom, Rackspace, Binero, Infomaniak and ORock.

Collier and Bryce emphasized that Open Source is a model for success through the cooperation of as many companies and development teams as possible who work together on code. This can also be used to meet other challenges that the Foundation sees: These include the estimated 180 zetabytes of data in the next 36 months or over 50 billion devices connected by the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2030. New members such as Vexxhost and Bloomberg also welcomed the OpenInfra Foundation. With them, the growth since the name change is 33 percent, according to the COO.

Live demo of threat modeling with Kata Containers

The usual fireworks of announcements of new functions or versions in the OpenInfra ecosystem remained the opening for the time being. The maturity of the overall project may also be reflected here. Participants from China could not come this time due to travel restrictions, which is why China Community Manager Horace Li from the OpenInfra Foundation and Xu Wang from the Ant Group addressed the audience with a video message instead.

Cysec’s talk got a bit more technical, in which three developers explained the principles of confidential computing and illustrated a use case for threat modeling with Kata containers in a live demo. Eric Ernst, Samuel Ortiz, Fabiano Fidêncio advocated using threat modeling from the user’s perspective instead of the previous cloud provider perspective, and showed that with Kata containers, host and guest interaction, among other things, with regard to API access can be restricted in such a way that the use of cloud infrastructure becomes more secure for user groups.

Software supply chain with open infrastructure

Other short presentations teased the focal points of the conference program: There are several Lectures on LOKI (Linux, OpenStack and Kubernetes infrastructure), open clouds and digital sovereignty ahead Frederic Lardinois from TechCrunch mo the political part of the opening: Dr. Franziska Brantner from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection presented the ongoing initiatives at federal level, such as 2 million euros in funding for the software supply chain, and emphasized the willingness of the ministry to continue to support the area. Daniel Melin had traveled from Sweden from Skatteverket, the Swedish combination of tax office and tax authority that uses OpenStack via Red Hat.

Finally, the winners of the Superuser Prize were announced. Here, for the first time, two companies share first place: OVHcloud and the Ant Group.

Supporting digital sovereignty and grassroots movements

Mark Collier, Jonathan Bryce and Thierry Carrez from the OpenInfra Foundation stood for Heise and other media representatives for questions at a subsequent press event. Among other things, those responsible emphasized to the journalists the social claim of the foundation, which has members in 182 countries worldwide, to enable manufacturer-independent access to technology and to support grassroots movements. There are local meet-ups in many regions of the world, and during the pandemic, it would have been easier for members from otherwise underrepresented countries to take part in the regular meetings. The community has become more diverse during this time.

Europe is of particular interest to the OpenInfra Foundation with a view to topics such as Gaia-X, Catena-X and questions of privacy and digital sovereignty, with cooperation predominating runs through the partners and members who maintain the necessary contacts with the government and administration locally and in their respective countries. The OpenInfra Foundation observes with interest the legislative concerns such as the Cloud Act. European research initiatives and organizations (with the exception of a few French institutes) are not yet represented in the OpenInfra Foundation. However, COO Mark Collier believes it is only a matter of time before this changes.

OpenInfra Foundation: beyond OpenStack

The OpenInfra Foundation has its roots in the founding year of 2012 – at that time it started as the administrative body for OpenStack , an open source infrastructure for cloud computing. The Foundation is now also working on other technologies such as machine learning, edge computing and hybrid clouds. In doing so, it draws on the support of more than 60 platinum, gold and silver members as well as partner companies and the OpenStack/OpenInfra community.

In addition to OpenStack, the projects of the OpenInfra Foundation include the Edge computing infrastructure Starlingx and the tool for lifecycle management Airship, in particular the CI/CD platform Zuul, which will celebrate its tenth birthday in 2022 and is available in version 6.0. According to those responsible for OpenInfra, Tesla is apparently planning to use Zuul for autonomous driving, and BMW and Volvo are also using the technology. The virtualized kata containers introduced around five years ago are also widespread.

Participate in the last-minute summit and other information

The summit organized by OpenInfra will take place from June 7th to 9th, 2022 in the Berlin Congress Center near Alexanderplatz browse the event website. Those who make last-minute decisions still have the opportunity to join. If you or your organization are interested in working with the Open Infrastructure Foundation, you can find more information about membership on their website.