The OpenStack Foundation today announced its plan to overcome what it says is the hardest problem in open source today: integrating and operating open source technologies to solve real-world problems.
The OpenStack Foundation made its announcement, kicking off the OpenStack Summit currently running in Sydney at the Darling Harbour International Convention Centre.
OpenStack is an open source integration engine that provides APIs to orchestrate bare metal, virtual machine and container resources on a single network. It is the power behind a global network of public and private clouds, backed by the largest ecosystem of technology providers enabling cost savings, control and portability. OpenStack’s community of more than 82,000 individuals across 187 countries delivers two Apache 2-licensed software releases each year.
The OpenStack Foundation opened the OpenStack Summit asking, "Can open source software innovate?", with the answer being a resounding yes. Yet, says Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, users ultimately do not care about containers or virtualisation or software-defined network or all these good things. "They need services that move money, to help make phone calls, and prevent identity theft," he said.
"We’re trying to make better decisions to help businesses run better and that’s not about just technology, but putting technology into the real world to solve real problems," Bryce said.
{loadposition david08}To address this, Bryce delivered the OpenStack Foundation announcement that it was investing significant financial and technical resources to address the integration of OpenStack and other relevant open source technologies. It will achieve this in four stages:
- Document cross-project use cases;
- Collaborate across communities, including upstream contributions to other open source projects;
- Fostering new projects at the OpenStack Foundation; and
- Co-ordinating end-to-end testing across projects.
“As open source leaders, we’ll fail our user base if we deliver innovation without integration, meaning the operational tools and knowledge to put it all into production,” said Bryce. “By working together across projects, we can invest in closing this gap and ensuring that infrastructure is not only open but also consumable by anyone in the world.”
Key to the plan is the OpenStack Foundation’s close collaboration with other open source projects and foundations, through joint events, testing and upstream contributions. “Collaboration across foundations and communities is essential for open source to reach its full potential,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “We need to support each other and make sure open technologies work well together in order to build user and ecosystem value around these shared assets.”
The OpenStack Foundation also announced initiatives to support its integration strategy including OpenLab, the Public Cloud Passport Program and the Financial Services Team.
The Passport Program provides free trials from participating OpenStack-powered public clouds including Catalyst, City Network, Elastx, Home at Cloud, Memset, OVH, Scale Up Tech, Telefonica, UKCloud and Vexxhost.
The Financial Services Team is operated by China UnionPay to aid financial industries in migrating to its OpenStack-based cloud in compliance with stringent regulatory workloads. The China UnionPay cloud supports many UnionPay business services and applications, managing over 50 million transactions per day.