OpenStack Foundation Showcases New Features, Roadmaps and Use Cases of Open Infrastructure Pilot Projects at OpenStack Summit

November 14, 2018 Off By David

The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) launched four pilot projects in the last 12 months, emphasizing its expanded mission to help users integrate and operate open infrastructure. The communities driving these pilot projects-Airship, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul-announced substantial progress on new features, technology roadmaps and use cases, and they are accelerating that progress via collaboration with the broader open infrastructure community at the Summit this week, driving their projects forward.

Airship Community Delivers Release Candidate for Declarative Infrastructure Management, 5G Demo at Berlin Summit

Airship makes it possible for users to deploy and manage containers, virtual machines and bare metal infrastructure environments across multiple sites in a repeatable and declarative fashion. The value of Airship for 5G and edge computing is that users can deploy and easily manage the same environment across hundreds or thousands of smaller sites. There also is value for upgrades and lifecycle management in large datacenters. Airship is a user-driven project being developed in production by AT&T and SK Telecom for 5G to NFV, VDI and big data processing.

During the OpenStack Summit Berlin keynote today, AT&T is demonstrating how its 5G commercial deployment is "born in the cloud," powered by OpenStack while deployed and managed by Airship.

The Airship community will also feature its Release Candidate in Berlin, ahead of the 1.0 version expected early next year. The community has been actively developing the release candidate since the project was introduced as an OSF pilot project in May and has achieved security at scale, scalable operations and reliable upgrades, as well nightly CI/CD validation of integrations and example deployments. The release candidate is ready to try, and the community has developed "Airship in a Bottle," an easy way to get started. Features on the roadmap for the 1.0 release include thorough documentation and OpenStack Ironic bare metal cloud integration.

***Learn more about the software and how to get involved in the community at http://www.airshipit.org.***

Kata Containers Advances Secure Container Runtime

Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight VMs that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. Since its launch in December 2017, Kata Containers has scaled to include support for major architectures, include AMD64, ARM and IBM p-series.

After delivering its 1.0 release in May, the community is working on 1.4, which will offer better logging, ipvlan/macvlan support through TC mirroring, and NEMU hypervisor support. The most recent 1.3.0 release was delivered in September. Notable achievements include containers getting entropy via virtio-rng, which creates a higher quality randomness for random number generation. Additionally, Kata Agent now has optional seccomp support, which is the first step to enabling seccomp in Kata Containers in the future, an important capability for end users.

The first Architecture Committee elections were held in September, and the community welcomed Eric Ernst (Intel) and Jon Olson (Google) who join existing members Samuel Ortiz (Intel), Xu Wang (Hyper), and Wei Zhang (Huawei).

The community recently hosted a meetup in China designed for large cloud providers including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and more to share adoption plans and feedback for the Kata Containers roadmap.

The Kata Containers community continues to work closely with the OCI and Kubernetes communities to ensure compatibility, and regularly tests Kata Containers across Azure, GCP and OpenStack public cloud environments.

***To download the software or get involved in the community, visit katacontainers.io.***

StarlingX Edge Cloud Celebrates First Release, Announces Technical Steering Committee Members

The StarlingX community delivered its first release of the open source edge platform for telecom and industrial IoT use cases on October 24. StarlingX leverages components of Ceph, OpenStack and Kubernetes and complements them with new services including configuration and fault management with a focus on key requirements such as high availability (HA), quality of service (QoS), performance and ultra-low latency.

The release reflects diversity in the StarlingX community, with 1,329 commits from 84 contributors, including developers representing 99Cloud, China UnionPay, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, SUSE and Wind River, among others.

The StarlingX Technical Steering Committee (TSC) was established with the following members: Curtis Collicutt (INTERdynamix), Ana Cunha (Ericsson), Shuquan Huang (99cloud), Ian Jolliffe (Wind River), Miguel Lavalle (Huawei), Brent Rowsell (Wind River), Dean Troyer (Intel) and Saul Wold (Intel). Going forward, the community expects to hold bi-annual elections for the TSC, starting 1H 2019.

***Download the first release of StarlingX at git.starlingx.io, and get involved in the community at starlingx.io.***

Zuul CI/CD users BMW and Leboncoin share case studies at scale

Zuul is an open source CI/CD platform designed to tackle the complexity of open source integration by gating new code against multiple projects and systems before landing a single patch. Zuul currently supports Gerrit and GitHub and leverages the Ansible ecosystem for third-party modules. Zuul is a new top-level pilot project at the Foundation but has been in development for six years and proven at scale supporting the OpenStack project.

At the OpenStack Summit Berlin today, a BMW keynote described how the company is using Zuul for big software projects that need high CI/CD performance. Also, Leboncoin, the largest French ecommerce destination, is delivering their use case for Zuul at scale in a session today.

Since the Zuul community launched version 3.0 in March 2018, they have been rapidly adding new features and integrations, including stronger integration with Github, support for Ansible 2.5, better usability, a containerized quick-start and more efficient build pipelines. Nodepool drivers for EC2, Kubernetes and OpenShift and are in review and support for Azure, GCP, Gitlab and Pagure are in the works.

***To learn more about the software, read case studies or get involved in the community, visit zuul-ci.org.***

Supporting Quotes

Ryan Van Wyk, AVP Network Cloud Engineering, AT&T

"Airship is the foundation of AT&T’s Network Cloud, which is powering our 5G core platform supporting a 5G launch in 12 cities this year. We collaborated to create the Airship project to evolve how we deliver our cloud platform at AT&T, as well as manage the lifecycle of the resulting cloud. Airship enables us to deploy and operate OpenStack clouds with the scale, speed, resiliency, flexibility and operational predictability demanded of our Network Cloud platform."

Dr. Kang-Won Lee, SVP Software R&D Center, SK Telecom

"Airship is becoming the foundation of SKT’s cloud infrastructure deployment effort, including private cloud service, VDI cloud service, big data and analytics cloud platform, and network virtualization. It enables us to deliver both OpenStack clouds and Kubernetes-based container infrastructure. SKT strongly supports the community’s efforts to evolve Airship as a valuable open infrastructure project in OpenStack ecosystem."

Dr. Dan Chen, senior director of Edge Computing, Intelligent Network Center, China Unicom

"We have run a full validation on StarlingX over the past six months. StarlingX improved efficiency on high-availability in both VMs and at the controller level. It also optimized the required number of nodes to support edge-deployment scenarios. Features were added in fault management, rolling upgrading, inventory discovery and VNF acceleration. StarlingX provided capability in VM-applications/VNFs hosting, and it also can be extended to support containerized applications in the future. It is one of the top strategies of China Unicom to build an ‘open’ edge platform. As an ‘Open Infra’ technology for edge computing, StarlingX will play an essential role in China Unicom’s edge strategy."

Mark Collier, COO, the OSF

"As the governance structure of the OSF is evolving to meet the needs of our open infrastructure community, these four pilot projects are already demonstrating impressive progress. What they’ve accomplished in a short period of time is a proof point that focusing on open infrastructure is the right model, putting users at the center of everything we do."