OpenStack Foundation Rebrands as Open Infrastructure Foundation

The OpenStack Foundation is rebranding itself as the Open Infrastructure Foundation. The news was announced at the virtual Open Infrastructure Summit on Oct. 19.

OpenStack is an open source cloud project that began as joint effort between NASA and Rackspace in 2010 and has grown its membership and contributions over the past decade. The formation of the OpenStack Foundation in 2012 was a major milestone for the organization as it moved the project to a multi-stakeholder, open governance model. But now the organization has decided it's time to take a broader view of the landscape—thus the rebrand.

The name Open Infrastructure isn't an entirely new one for OpenStack. Since 2018, the OpenStack Summit, which is the main conference for OpenStack, has been known as the Open Infrastructure Summit. In a keynote address, Mark Collier, chief operating officer at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, said the simple definition for open infrastructure is it is infrastructure built with open source software, but there is more to what the rebranded foundation is aiming to achieve.

"When you think about open infrastructure, we're really building communities to write software to run in production," Collier said.

Open Infrastructure vs. Cloud Native

A common term in the cloud space is "cloud-native," which is often associated with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and its flagship project Kubernetes.

In a keynote at the event, Thierry Carrez, vice president of engineering at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, said his personal definition for cloud native is applications designed to run on programmable infrastructure.

"Cloud native requires programmable infrastructure, and open infrastructure provides an open source solution for that," Carrez said. "So cloud native and open

infrastructure really go together like bread and butter."

OpenStack Victoria

While the OpenStack Foundation is being rebranded to address a broader vision, the primary project within the organization remains the OpenStack cloud platform itself. On Oct. 14, just ahead of the virtual summit, the OpenStack Victoria platform was released, the second major update to OpenStack in 2020, following the Ussuri release that debuted in May.

OpenStack Victoria was an active release cycle, with 790 developers from 160 organizations contributing a total of just over 20,000 code changes. In a briefing with press and analysts, Jonathan Bryce (pictured), executive director of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, highlighted a number of key features in the release, including native integration with the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

"We continue to see many companies that are deploying OpenStack and Kubernetes together; they are complementary technologies," Bryce said.

One way that OpenStack Victoria boosts Kubernetes integration is improved support in the OpenStack Ironic bare metal project. Among the growing use cases for Ironic is in a stand-alone deployment, where is it used on its own to help management of infrastructure at the edge of the network, or within a data center.

The OpenStack Neutron project also got a boost with the Victoria release, benefiting from expanded IPv6 support. IPv6 is the successor to the IPv4 internet address protocol, providing more addresses to support the growing global demand for connectivity.

"We're starting to see organizations that are running IPv6-only networks, and that's a big transition from where the networking world has been," Bryce said.