Lifetime OpenStack Contributor Metrics Now Available in Bitergia Dashboard

 

June 13, 2023

Contributing to OpenStack and joining the community is one of my proudest accomplishments, hands down. In fact, I actually have a skirt printed with lines of code showing the state of OpenStack (projects.yaml) from the day my first patch landed in Cinder. 

But it’s definitely not just me that has made OpenStack into one of the top five most active open source projects in the world. Thousands of contributors from around the world have delivered changes, bug fixes, and documentation. The data behind these contributors has been something we announce twice a year, with each new software release, but it hasn’t been available to the general public in a clear and easy way to explore. Until now. 

During the OpenInfra Summit Vancouver keynotes this morning, I had the pleasure of announcing the availability of an OpenStack dashboard that collects and analyzes the data behind the OpenStack repositories. This dashboard is made available by Bitergia, the official metrics partner of the OpenInfra Foundation. 

Here are some trends and data points that the dashboard provides: 

  • The evolution of contribution to the different OpenStack projects over time
  • The distribution of repositories across OpenStack components 

The part that I am most excited about is that the OpenStack contribution data can also be visually connected to data from adjacent open source communities, like Kubernetes. This illustrates the power of cross-community collaboration to ensure interoperability between the two projects – something that thousands of organizations rely on. 


If you want to become part of this intertwined network, the OpenStack community is always welcoming new contributors! Reach out to the First Contact SIG or check out the Upstream Investment Opportunities list for more information! 

Calling all OpenStack Operators! The PTG starts Monday, and the community needs your input!

 

October 10, 2022

I’m an OpenStack Operator going to the PTG, where should I go? 

PTGs aren’t just for OpenInfra developers! The discussions need perspectives from a broader group to make the event successful. This includes operators who are running OpenInfra projects in production (Public and Private Cloud, Research, etc), plan to run a project in the future, or simply projects that you have feedback for.  Even if you are running an older release of OpenStack, your feedback and questions and opinions are still incredibly valuable!

The schedule is mostly setup in the PTGbot and you are encouraged to attend any that fit with your schedule! Agendas can be found in the project etherpads here. Aside from the OpenStack Operators session taking place on Thursday – you are a team as well afterall! – there are a few sessions that would be good to make sure are on your list of discussions to attend.

Registration is free.

Monday:

Tuesday: 

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

There are a lot of opportunities to make an impact on the software and help the community next week; please get involved!

Virtuozzo joins the OpenStack Marketplace, and Sharktech does too. Shouldn’t you?

 

September 5, 2022

We’re excited to announce that Virtuozzo is now part of the OpenStack Marketplace – and even better, our US cloud partner Sharktech has joined too.

The OpenStack Marketplace has a simple goal: to make it easy to find cloud services and technologies that help you leverage the awesome open-source OpenStack framework. It’s a natural home for Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure, our production-ready OpenStack cloud platform.

By making OpenStack easy to deploy, manage and update – and easy to monetize – Virtuozzo enables any Cloud Service Provider, MSP or Telco to offer a much more affordable and compelling alternative to hyperscale clouds like AWS and Azure, without the time and cost of developing their own solution.

You can now find Virtuozzo in the OpenStack Marketplace Distro, Public Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud categories – check them out!

“There’s a shift underway in the market as organizations realize that managed services for open-source projects like OpenStack have matured to become full-fledged competitors to hyperscale cloud providers. This shift is both healthy and necessary, as organizations work to claw back control over their data and where compute takes place. The rapidly growing, global footprint of OpenStack managed services is contributing to this shift, and it’s exciting to see collaboration among players like Virtuozzo and Sharktech delivering these services at scale,” said Jimmy McArthur, Senior Manager of Community and Business Development at OpenInfra Foundation.

OpenStack at the Heart of Alternative Cloud

Speaking about the news, Virtuozzo CEO Alex Fine said: “Wherever we turn and whomever we speak to – cloud users, cloud providers, analysts or partners – the message is clear: the world needs an alternative to the super-complex and expensive hyperscale clouds.”

“Virtuozzo is leading the charge to make cloud easy, accessible and affordable for all. That is what we call the alternative cloud, and OpenStack technologies are at its heart. We’re excited to be part of the OpenStack Marketplace, along with more and more of our partners – the companies bringing alternative cloud services to businesses across the world.”

Building the future of cloud with OpenStack technologies is part of our long-term commitment and passion for open-source. For more than 20 years, the Virtuozzo engineering team has been actively contributing to OpenStack, Linux and the Linux kernel – including KVM, QEMU and LibVirt, CRIU and P.Haul – and of course OpenVZ, and VzLinux, our own free distro.

Sharktech Joins, Too

The latest Virtuozzo partner to join the marketplace is Sharktech. Founded in 2003, Sharktech has grown from its headquarters in Las Vegas to offer a range of hosting services from datacenters in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and Amsterdam.

In 2021, Sharktech launched a new range of cloud services based on Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure. Sharktech is now an important part of the Virtuozzo cloud ecosystem, not just for SME and enterprise users, but for other service providers looking to build their own cloud services business.

“OpenStack always had the potential to become the de facto cloud platform, but for hosting providers like us, it was always kind of daunting. That isn’t because we don’t have the skills to build our own OpenStack cloud – it’s just the time and cost of building it ourselves,” said Sharktech CEO, Tim Timrawi.

“Virtuozzo has streamlined OpenStack, removed the complexity and packaged it in a way that makes sense for service providers. As a result, we can bring high quality, ultra-robust and very cost-effective services to market – and of course, we’re excited that Sharktech cloud is now easy to find through the OpenStack Marketplace.”  

More Info

Virtuozzo is the easiest way for service providers to create their own profitable, successful cloud services business.

Learn more about Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure, and don’t forget to check out Sharktech.net… …and of course, if you already offer cloud based on Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure, get your brand and services added to the OpenStack Marketplace!

What Operators Can Expect to Discuss with the OpenStack Manila Team at the PTG

 

August 1, 2022

If you’re an OpenStack operator, you should check out my previous blog post about why you should attend the upcoming Project Teams Gathering (PTG). In an effort to help OpenStack operators get the most out of a PTG, we surveyed some project team leads (PTLs)  about the operator engagement they would most like to see. First up, we have Nova!

Special thanks to the Manila team, lead by PTL Goutham Pacha Ravi for taking time to put together these responses.

What do you want to hear from operators about at the PTG?

In the Shared File Systems service (manila) project, for the past three virtual PTGs we have invited one or two operators to share specific concerns with us. The discussions that followed have spawned several bugs and blueprints. We’ve discussed operational best practices, sporadic problems that arise at scale, storage for application containers, continuous integration testing, interoperability and missing features.

For this PTG, we would like to do the same – the strategy of keeping it to a few burning issues has certainly been very helpful. Our topics aren’t set in stone yet, but for starters, we’d like to get operator feedback on deploying and managing Manila with CephFS. Alongside, we want to know the strategies used by operators to maintain high availability of the control plane; and finally, we want to get feedback on several parallel community-wide efforts:

  • Secure RBAC and “system” personas
  • Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)
  • Adoption of the OpenStackClient

What topics are already on your agenda?

We’ve started collecting them here: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/columbus-ptg-manila-planning

What are your goals for the October 2022 PTG?

Streamline and prioritize code contributor and reviewer efforts for the Antelope cycle, highlight technical debt and get help.

We look forward to seeing EVERYONE at the PTG in October! Registration is currently open and free to everyone who would like to attend. If you haven’t signed your team up yet, do it by August 26!

What Operators Can Expect to Discuss with the OpenStack Nova Team at the PTG

 

July 27, 2022

If you’re an OpenStack operator, you should check out my previous blog post about why you should attend the upcoming Project Teams Gathering (PTG). In an effort to help OpenStack operators get the most out of a PTG, we surveyed some project team leads (PTLs)  about the operator engagement they would most like to see. First up, we have Nova!

Special thanks to the Nova team for taking time to put together these responses.

After talking things over with his team, Sylvain Bauza, the Nova PTL, sent us some summaries of feedback they collected in this etherpad:  https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/nova-ptg-columbus-ops-presence.

What do you want to hear from operators about at the PTG?

In general, we expect some feedback from the operators about their usecases and how they use some Nova features when we discuss about some new design enhancements in the PTG room.But this time, as we had a meet-and-greet session in Berlin where operators also provided their pain points, it would be nice if we could also discuss about those issues and what we could do for fixing them.

What topics are already on your agenda?

In general, we only have an agenda in the last week(s?) before the PTG but we already have some points we know we would like to discuss : 

  • Ironic has an issue with rebalancing nodes so I’d love to discuss with both the Ironic contributors but also the operators to understand their problems and how we could fix this. 
  • Given of the new RBAC policies, we would need to continue discussing how to modify our APIs for them. Having for example public cloud operators around would be loved as they could explain us which kind of values they would like to see as default. 
  • Because of the new tick-tock release model, we need to think about both the Antelope release and the BB and CC releases to see how we organize upgrades. 
  • We also want to discuss about sustainability in Nova and how to support Scaphandre. I guess operators would like to hear about what we could work on Antelope and what they would prefer to see first. 

What are your goals for the October 2022 PTG?

Basically, planning the Antelope release from a design perspective and discussing about next cycles (at least for BB and CC releases), like we do at every PTG, but if were having operators, we could also make sure we would have a specific Nova operators-welcome day (eg. on Tuesday) where the team would discuss about features and pain points while refraining ourselves to go into technical deepdive discussions with whiteboards etc.

This is just ONE team, there are already about a dozen teams signed up to participate, and there’s still more time for teams to signup so we expect there will be many conversations that would be important for operators to paricipate in! 

We look forward to seeing EVERYONE at the PTG in October! Registration is currently open and free to everyone who would like to attend. If you haven’t signed your team up yet, do it by August 26!

How to Have a Successful PTG as an OpenStack Operator

 

July 25, 2022

Myth: Project Teams Gatherings (PTGs) are working events organized by the OpenInfra Foundation only for OpenStack developers to collaborate on an upcoming release. 

Let’s break that down. 

Project Teams Gatherings (PTGs) are working events organized by the OpenInfra Foundation: CORRECT. PTGs are only for OpenStack developers to collaborate on an upcoming release: WRONG. 

While PTGs are for OpenStack developers, attendees form a broader group to make the event successful. This includes operators who are running projects in production, plan to run the project in the future or projects they have feedback for.  Even if you are running an older release of OpenStack, your feedback and questions and opinions are still incredibly valuable!

Who should attend a PTG? 

First of all, any open source project is welcome to participate in the PTG. Typically, the majority of attendees are from an OpenInfra project—OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX—but other adjacent communities are also invited and encouraged to attend. 

It’s also not limited to upstream contributors. Any team can participate in the PTG—that means that its not just projects, its also SIGs, Working Groups, pop-up teams and other forms of collaboration! There are of course the usual suspects that typically attend—contributors from OpenStack, StarlingX, and Kata—but subteams within those projects also can meet (RBAC pop-up, Nova, Neutron, Manila, Large Scale SIG, etc), in addition to Foundation level working groups like the Edge Computing Group and Diversity and Inclusion Working Group who also participate.

These teams group source their agendas after they sign up to attend, so if you are interested in bringing up a topic with them, please do! Many of the teams use etherpads to collect topics and then gauge interest levels of people planning to attend before organizing the dicussion topics into a schedule. While they are doing this collection of topics, they are also signing up for time + space to meet, so if there is a topic you want to talk about but you can’t be there, let them know in the etherpad so they can try to accomodate your schedule! 

You are encouraged to attend as many groups meetings as you would like. Different teams will be meeting throughout the week. As an example, it’s totally okay to attend  Nova discussions in the morning before headed to the Zuul room after lunch and then pop over to the Cinder room for a particular discussion on CEPH that you are interested in. Teams try to expose the topics they are actively talking about and planning to talk about next via the PTGBot- more on that later.

Specifically, how should OpenStack operators participate at PTGs?

Of course there will be topics that are more specific to operations and using OpenStack clouds that might not fit into any particular team or group signed up, the OpenStack operators are a team and are encouraged to sign up for time/space just like any other team. You can group source and manage your own agenda and use the PTGBot just like any other team. If there are topics you want particular people to participate in, you can invite representatives from those projects to join in those topics as well. 

The key to success here is to be as open and flexible as possible. Sometimes you might need to hop into a different room to attend a particular discussion and sometimes you might need to poke at people to come to the critical mass you already have assembled for a topic. What’s important to remember is that we are all just subteams hoping to make open source and OpenStack a better projects. 

I’ve reached out to a few of the project teams who are participating at the October PTG to highlight the impact operators can have on already scheduled meetings. I encourage you to follow along as we hear what these teams have planned and what you can get out of attending the October PTG. 

We look forward to seeing EVERYONE at the PTG in October! Registration is currently open and free to everyone who would like to attend. If you haven’t signed your team up yet, do it now by August 26!

Have questions? Ping me on the OFTC network on IRC at diablo_rojo.

OVHcloud, Ant Group Win Superuser Awards for Large-Scale Deployment of OpenStack, Innovative Use of Kata Containers to Reduce Carbon Emissions, Respectively

 

June 7, 2022

OpenInfra Foundation lauds infrastructure teams at OVHcloud and Ant Group for community contributions and for using open infrastructure technology to provide strategic value to their organizations 

OVHcloud and Ant Group have tied for top honors as co-winners of the 2022 Superuser Awards, which recognizes organizations that have used open infrastructure to improve their business while contributing back to the OpenInfra community. The news was announced today by the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation).

OVHcloud, a global cloud provider, manages 33 data centers across 13 sites on four continents, manufacturing its own servers, building its own data centers and deploying its own fiber-optic global network to achieve maximum efficiency. OVHcloud is currently running over 400,000 instances with 900,000 cores of OpenStack and processes over 6 million API requests every hour. The OVHcloud team deploys most of the OpenStack core components, such as Nova, Cinder, Glance, Neutron, Swift, Keystone and Horizon, as well as other components like Octavia, Barbican, Mistral, Heat, Tempest, Rally and Manila. 

The OVHcloud team has been actively involved in the OpenInfra community since 2014, including participating in meetups, summits, OpenStack Days, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and OpenInfra Live episodes. The team regularly contributes to code, including dozens of reviews, commits and bug fixes, and also open sourced OS Archiver to manage data retention in the SQL databases behind OpenStack. OVHcloud has been one of the cloud providers for the OpenStack CI/CD since 2015.

Gilles Closset, strategic technology alliances director at OVHcloud, described in his nomination of the OVHcloud team how open infrastructure aligns with one of the company’s core values: freedom. “With a strong foundation based on the open infrastructure ecosystem, OVHcloud aims to federate all players that believe in an open system where anyone stays in control of their data – to manage in an open, trustful, reversible and transparent way.”

Ant Group is an innovative technology company that aims to bring inclusive benefits and sustainable services to the world. Formally established in October 2014, it traces its origins back to Alipay, which launched in 2004.

In April 2022, Ant Group announced that it achieved carbon neutrality in 2021 by reducing 29,591.48 tons of CO2 emission with green computing technologies, including Kata Containers.

Comprising more than 30 members, the Kata Containers team at Ant Group is responsible for the container-related R&D of the company and working for sustainable IT infrastructure. Many of the team members have been active upstream Kata Containers project contributors and maintainers since the first day of the project. In addition, the team has organized events, drafted roadmaps, led feature developments, enriched documentation, fixed bugs and helped other users to adopt Kata Containers in production.

Download the Ant Group Kata Containers White Paper
The Kata Containers team at Ant Group has published a white paper titled, “Kata Containers Best Practices at Ant Group” available here.

Read More about the 2022 Superuser Awards Nominees
Launched at the Paris Summit in 2014, the Superuser Awards recognize open infrastructure users who are making a difference in the Openinfra community and demonstrating how open infrastructure software is providing strategic value in their organization. The community submits nominees to Superuser, and the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board determines the winners. 

In addition to OVHcloud and Ant Group, 2022 nominees included:
Arvan Cloud
CanaryBit
Daniel Byström
Fairbanks
Inspur
Jiangsu Suzhong Construction Group Co., IT Team 
OpenMetal
Volvo Cars Corporation
Zhejiang Expressway Co., Ltd., IT Team

April 2022 vPTG Recap

 

May 9, 2022

That’s a wrap! Our most recent virtual Project Team Gathering (PTG) ran from April 4th to 8th. What is hopefully our last virtual PTG for a while ended on a high note with lots of productive conversations. The PTG hosted a variety of Open Infrastructure Foundation teams and projects from OpenStack and StarlingX to the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group and the Edge Computing Group. 

Below are summaries written by community members about the meetings various teams had. 

Don’t see your summary in the list? Let us know! We are happy to get it added! 

Stay tuned for updates on our next Project Team Gathering! Hopefully we will SEE you and your team there!

2021 OpenInfra Annual Report: Large Scale SIG

 

February 2, 2022

The OpenInfra Foundation annual report for 2021 is now live, including sections on open infrastructure growth, all OpenInfra projects, Foundation updates, SIG and WG updates, and more.

The Large Scale SIG is an OpenStack special interest group gathering operators of large scale OpenStack deployments interested in sharing their experience and discussing best practices. The group has been meeting regularly this year, with about 6 people forming the core group and a dozen of other people more infrequently involved.

One output of the group is the Scaling Journey: a set of wiki pages that describe the various stages of scaling your OpenStack deployments from tens of nodes or tens of thousands of nodes. That path was traveled by a lot of operators before, but lack of documentation and practical experience sharing still makes it a daunting prospect. The goal of the SIG is to document frequently asked questions and answers, as well as point to relevant resources, to make that journey as predictable and pleasant as possible.

Another focus of the Large Scale SIG this year was the “Large Scale OpenStack” show, a recurring event on the OpenInfra Live webcast. We invited operators of large scale deployments and got them to present how they solve a given operations challenge, and discuss live between themselves their different approaches. We tackled topics like upgrades in large scale environments, spare capacity handling, software-defined supercomputers, scaling Neutron, as well as operators tricks and tools. This show was amongst the most popular episodes on OpenInfra Live, and our goal is to continue in 2022.

Read the full 2021 OpenInfra Annual Report here!

Tags:

2021 OpenInfra Annual Report: OpenStack

 

January 26, 2022

OpenStack continues to be one of the most active open source communities with more than 25 million cores in production. This year, the OpenStack community continued to produce more software that is run in production. Notable highlights include:

  • Wallaby: Wallaby, the 23rd release of OpenStack, was developed by over 800 contributors from 140 organizations in 45 countries. Comprised of more than 17,000 code changes, Wallaby focused on integration with other open source projects like CEPH, Kubernetes, and Prometheus. OpenStack continues to be the third most active open source project (along with the Linux kernel and Chromium).
  • Xena: The Xena release brought with it better integration amongst OpenStack projects, support for advanced hardware features, and reduction of technical debt. Nova’s support for SmartNICs and ECMP routes in Neutron are a few of the hardware features now supported. Together, over 680 contributors worked in a short 25 weeks to present the 24th release of OpenStack.
  • Technical Writing SIG Dissolution: After successfully migrating the docs to project repositories several releases ago, and mostly maintaining an advisory role now, the Technical Writing SIG decided to dissolve and migrate the last of their repositories to other teams. At the PTG, the Technical Writing SIG Chair met with the Technical Committee and the First Contact SIG worked out a plan to retire the Technical Writing SIG.
  • Skyline: OpenStack welcomed its newest project since the addition of Adjutant in 2018! Skyline is an OpenStack dashboard built with React as an alternative to the Horizon dashboard. While not ready for production use just yet, the dashboard is engineered so that functions directly call OpenStack APIs to make maintaining the dashboard easier for developers and interactions faster and more efficient for users. This effort has been supported by the Horizon team as a future replacement once Skyline’s functionality gets closer to parity with Horizon. The Technical Committee accepted with with the caveat that Skyline with be labeled as a ‘tech preview’ until it undergoes the changes to bring it more in line with how other OpenStack services are organized and released.
  • TC Stance on OpenStackClient: The Technical Committee formalized their stance on the OpenStackClient in a resolution this year. Instead of making the development of OpenStackClient a community wide goal, but still wanting to show support and stand with the OpenStackClient team, they settled on a resolution with the intention of circling back to evaluate if the OpenStack community is ready for the OpenStackClient community goal.
  • IRC Network Migration: There was a change in ownership, organization structure, and policy in Freenode, the IRC network that the community has made use of for years. In response, the community discussed alternatives and settled on migrating over to a different network, but keeping IRC as the synchronous chat platform our community uses. As of late May, the OpenStack community has moved to the OFTC Network. Most teams were a part of this transition.

Get involved:

MORE OPENSTACK IN PRODUCTION THAN EVER

In November 2020, the OpenStack community celebrated 15 million cores in production. Just 12 months later, over 25 million cores were recorded in the annual OpenStack User Survey, marking 66% growth compared to 2020. This growth was seen among organizations of all sizes, including seven organizations who were recording over 1 million cores in production.

Walmart, LINE, Workday, China Mobile, and Verizon Media were among the founding members of the OpenStack Million Core Club. They were recognized during the OpenInfra Live: Keynotes, celebrating their incredible scale and innovation with OpenStack.

OPENSTACK CERTIFIED ADMINISTRATOR (COA) EXAM

The Certified OpenStack Administrator exam is the only professional certification offered by the OpenInfra Foundation.

In 2021,

  • COA exam vouchers were purchased: 109
  • 193 students passed

Among the exam takers, students were from 29 countries, including

  • United States
  • United Kingdom
  • Canada
  • Bolivia
  • China
  • Columbia
  • Cyprus
  • Egypt
  • France
  • Germany
  • Ghana
  • Guatemala
  • Hungary
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • Mexico
  • Netherlands
  • Peru
  • Poland
  • Russia
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Singapore
  • Spain
  • Switzerland
  • Thailand
  • Turkey
  • Uganda
  • Ukraine
  • Vietnam

OPENSTACK UPSTREAM INSTITUTE

The training was held twice throughout the year. The first training took place as part of the Open Source Day stand alone event held by the Anita B Foundation who also hosts the Grace Hopper Celebration. The ratio of mentors to students was very high (2:1) which yielded not only a productive day full of good discussions, but a highly specialized experience for the attendees that participated in the event. Upstream Institute was held in a one-day format where the mentors focused on sharing information about the OpenStack community including the tools and processes that contributors use on a daily basis.

The afternoon section of the training concentrated on hands-on experience where students worked on reproducing and fixing bugs in the OpenStack code base. Attendees who were able to stay for the afternoon learned how to push a code change upstream for review and several of them were able to go above and beyond. They were able to reproduce their bugs and also submit a fix to it. The training was very sucessful and we got great feedback and engagement from students.

The second training held in 2021 was also an online training that was held as part of the Open Source Day within the Grace Hopper Celebration in October. Similar to the first rendition, the training was held in one-day format with lectures in the morning and hands-on exercises in the afternoon. Again, the students worked on fixing real bugs and the more than 14 mentors made sure that attendees learned the mechanics of uploading a change for review, which is essential to be able to contribute code or documentation after the course. Four attendees pushed patches for bugs that were real fixes to OpenStack and as a result, they entered into a drawing that Grace Hopper was hosting to incentivize working on open source.

While the possibilities to hold the training were again, very limited in 2021, a group of mentors keep maintaining the course material to ensure it is up to date for every training occasion to provide the best experience to the students who joined. The content, being fully open source and available online, provides the possibility for individuals and organizations to go through it as a self-paced course or run it locally.

You can read the full 2021 OpenInfra Annual Report here!

Tags: