At the OpenStack Summit in Berlin this week, the OpenStack Foundation announced that from now all its bi-annual conferences will be conducted under the name of ‘Open Infrastructure Summit’. According to TechCrunch, the Foundation itself won’t have a rebranding of its name, but a change will be brought about in the nature of what the Foundation is doing.
The board will now be adopting new projects outside of the core OpenStack project. There will also be a process for adding “pilot projects” and fostering them for a minimum of 18 months. The focus for these projects will be on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), container infrastructure, edge computing, data center, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. OpenStack currently has these pilot projects in development: Airship, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul.
OpenStack says that the idea of the foundation is not to manage multiple projects, or increase the Foundation’s revenue. However, the scope of this idea is focused around people who run or manage infrastructure. There are no new boards of directors or foundations for each
project.
The team also assures its members that the actual OpenStack technology isn’t going anywhere. OpenStack Foundation CTO Mark Collier said “We said very clearly this week that open infrastructure starts with OpenStack, so it’s not separate from it. OpenStack is the anchor tenant of the whole concept,” Collier said.
Sell added, “All that we are doing is actually meant to make OpenStack better.”
Adding his insights on the decision, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is worried that the focus on multiple projects will “confuse people about OpenStack.” he further adds that “I would really like to see the Foundation employ the key contributors to OpenStack so that the heart of OpenStack had long-term stability that wasn’t subject to a popularity contest every six months,”
Boris Renski, co-founder of OpenSTack stated that as of today a number of companies are back to doubling down on OpenStack as their core focus. He attributes this to the foundation’s focus on edge computing. The highest interest in OpenStack being shown by China.
The OpenStack Foundation’s decision to tackle open source infrastructure problems, while keeping the core of the actual OpenStack project intact, is refreshing. The only possible competition it can face is from the Linux Foundation backing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
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