10 Years of OpenStack – Xiaoguang Zhang at China Mobile

Happy 10 years of OpenStack! Millions of cores, 100,000 community members, 10 years of you.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful means to influence, teach, and inspire the people around us. To celebrate OpenStack’s 10th anniversary, we are spotlighting stories from the individuals in various roles from the community who have helped to make OpenStack and the global Open Infrastructure community successful. 

Here, we’re talking to Xiaogang Zhang from China Mobile. He tells the community about how he got started with OpenStack and his favorite memory from the last 10 years of OpenStack

How did you get started working with OpenStack and what are you doing now?

After joining China Mobile in 2013, I started to intensely study OpenStack’s flexible open-source architecture, and I helped the company to revise the series of specifications of private cloud based on OpenStack. After that, I built a hybrid cloud platform within China Mobile Research Institute based on OpenStack, providing cloud computing and big data resources for the research, development, and testing of various departments of the Research Institute. Since 2017, I have been engaged in the research and development of the telecom cloud in OpenStack which includes the verification of various technical solutions and the cloud integration system. Currently, I focus on the implementation of automation integration practice, helping China Mobile to build the world’s largest network cloud platform, carrying 4G / 5G services.

What is your favorite memory from the last 10 years of OpenStack?

In October 2016, I was honored to represent China Mobile at the OpenStack Foundation gold membership defense and helped China Mobile to be successfully selected. At the Summit in 2016, China Mobile won the Superuser Awards, which reflected the foundation’s recognition of open source work in the cloud computing field in China Mobile, and I participated in the award ceremony with my colleagues.

How did you contribute to the OpenStack community?

From private cloud, hybrid cloud, and network cloud, we have been promoting and practicing OpenStack in all ways. During this period, we closely followed the development and improvement of OpenStack, helped the company from introducing the concept of OpenStack, completing the architecture design, constantly updating the technical solutions, and finally evolved to the large-scale deploying of network cloud, supporting 4G / 5G business. I delivered four sessions at all the OpenStack Summits and shared large-scale automation integration at this year’s virtual OpenDev 2020.

What advice do you have for the Stacker community and other growing open source communities based on your experience with OpenStack?

A good open source project must have a clear positioning. Just like OpenStack is positioned to provide IaaS open source infrastructure, its open architecture, API, and community model quickly gathered a lot of popularity and later attracted tremendous support from the developers around the globe. The second focus is on evangelism. In addition to the annual Summit, OpenStack has received extensive attention and recognition through regional Summits, hackathons, and developer conferences. On the other hand, the community focuses on promoting industry applications. There are many remarkable places in private cloud and telecommunications applications.

If I were to ask you in 2030, what do you think the OpenStack update will be?

There may be more and better open source projects emerging by 2030, but there is no doubt that OpenStack will be one of the most successful open source projects, and not only the IaaS infrastructure provided by OpenStack will bring great contributions to the cloud computing industry. More importantly, the concept of open source and the culture of open source has become more popular, and the open source model will have a huge impact on the development of IT in the future.

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If you’re interested in being featured to tell your stories about OpenStack, please email [email protected].

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