The Open Infrastructure Foundation is out with the new OpenStack Xena release and results of its new user survey showing impressive growth. We wanted to quickly cover that as the growth was huge. The foundation also has a new member that may raise some eyebrows.
Open Infrastructure Foundation and OpenStack
The big news is that Microsoft has joined as a Platinum member. They are joining many other large names in the industry here. AMD appears to be notably absent.
Getting to some OpenStack numbers, OpenStack has well over a half-million changes with over 8500 developers. It also says that in 2021 it has approved over 130 changes per day. For some sense of scale, the company says that it is around the #3 or so largest open-source project behind other major ones like Linux.
Open Infrastructure Foundation does a community survey and the 2021 results are in. there were over 100 new clouds set up in the last 18 months.
One of the big changes is simply the number of cores in production. That number we would expect removes older hardware and is the net number of active cores. This has increased by 10 million cores in the last year. That should be over 300K processors (not everyone uses 64 core and higher CPUs.) Seven organizations are now running over 1 million cores, but China Mobile seems to be leading at over 6 million cores.
Some of the big OpenStack Xena changes include hardware support. For example, one can have bare metal servers being deployed with SmartNICs. We asked if DPU cores were included in this core count and were told it would likely be something they looked at in the next iteration of the survey.
Even during the pandemic, the OpenStack team was able to integrate across time zones and projects to add new features.
A lot of work was done to add new hardware features to storage and networking components. Something that we will quickly note here, the language is probably confusing if you are not in the OpenStack community.
During the pandemic, OpenStack Xena also saw efforts to catch up with some technical debt that accumulated over the years.
Overall, there is quite a bit new in this release.
Final Words
OpenStack is strange. Years ago it was the subject of industry watercooler talk about the difficulty to setup. Now, it is deployed, and not just on a small scale. China Mobile with over 6 million cores or over 20% of the install base is a massive installation. Perhaps the momentum, in this case, is more exciting than the new features. OpenStack seems to have transitioned from being known as a difficult to run solution to now having some impressive growth figures.
