The Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra), which oversees the development of the open source OpenStack cloud computing framework, this week agreed to become an arm of The Linux Foundation as part of an effort to foster more collaboration with maintainers of projects such as Kubernetes and the Linux operating system.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation, said cross-pollination across these three leading open source projects will further streamline deployments, at a time when OpenStack is experiencing a resurgence and when enterprise IT organizations are looking to reduce costs.
That resurgence is specifically being driven by a Broadcom decision to increase VMware licensing fees, the need to increase utilization rates of graphical processor units (GPUs), running artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, and the rise of data sovereignty regulations that require organizations to repatriate applications running in the cloud into a local data center environment, said Bryce.
In total, there are roughly 110,000 members of the OpenInfra community, which in addition to OpenStack, participate in projects such as Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul. The alliance with the Linux Foundation should reduce the total cost of maintaining these projects by, for example, allowing OpenInfra to take advantage of existing support resources already being provided to other open-source projects.
It’s been 15 years since OpenStack was first launched, and 31 updates later the framework is still widely employed in the telecommunications sector. However, more recently organizations such as GEICO have decided to repatriate workloads from the cloud to run on instances of Kubernetes deployed on top of OpenStack.
It’s not clear how many organizations are now looking to deploy cloud-native applications on top of a framework that, in addition to providing an open source virtual machine to isolate workloads, provides access to components such as Nova to provision virtual machines along with Neutron networking software and Cinder block storage software.
The one thing that is certain is that in uncertain economic times, more organizations tend to become sensitive to the total cost of IT. There may be significant costs involved in migrating existing workloads to a new platform, but for greenfield applications open-source platforms can provide a more attractive financial option.
At the same time, GPUs remain scarce and many organizations are looking for management frameworks that enable them to increase the number of workloads that can share those resources.
Regardless of motivation, the alliance with The Linux Foundation will at the very least expose more contributors and maintainers to OpenStack. It’s not uncommon, for example, for members of The Linux Foundation to contribute to multiple projects, including those being advanced by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Cloud Foundry Foundation, both of which are arms of The Linux Foundation.
At a time when many DevOps organizations are starting to embrace platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale, increased levels of cooperation across multiple open source projects can only hasten the speed at which many of them will be able to achieve that goal.
