OpenStack Foundation (OSF) held 'OpenStack Summit Berlin' at Citycube Berlin, Germany from November 13 to 15. 'OpenStack Summit Berlin' was held under the theme of 'Open Infrastructure', with over 200 sessions and workshops in more than 35 projects with experts and representatives from over 50 countries.

‘OpenStack Summit Berlin’ addresses not only the cloud but also innovative technologies and cases of various types of ‘Open Infrastructure’ ranging from edge computing, CI/CD, AI, network virtualization (NFV). And more than 200 sessions and workshops were held in more than 35 open source projects. In particular, Germany, where the summit was held, is considered to be one of the most active areas where OpenStack is used. Large telecommunication companies, enterprises and public cloud service providers in Germany are actively utilizing the OpenStack-based environment, and it is also considered to be an active region in terms of community size and activity.

OpenStack Foundation has also released some new news through ‘OpenStack Summit Berlin’. First, with the current progress of four new ‘pilot projects’ which have been introduced at the OpenStack Summit in addition to the OpenStack project in the past year, the new project policy reflecting it was announced. Moreover, the application area of OpenStack has expanded to artificial intelligence and HPC, so various project updates for this were introduced. Meanwhile, the OpenStack Foundation also announced the plan to change the name of the Summit from 'OpenStack Summit' to 'Open Infrastructure Summit' from the next summit.

▲ Mark Collier, chief operating officer, OpenStack Foundation

▲ According to the emergence of ‘pilot projects’, the mission of the foundation was extended further.

As breaking news, Mark Collier, COO of OpenStack Foundation, announced that the name of the next OpenStack release, which has been decided in an alphabetical order, will be ‘Train’. He explained that the idea came from a train that kept everyone awake at the Denver PTG, since the location is near the station. Also, he stated that the next OpenStack Summit that will be held at Denver in April 2019 will be the first summit called as ‘Open Infrastructure Summit’, and the ‘Open Infrastructure Summit’ in the fourth quarter of 2019 will be the first summit held in China, a rapidly emerging market.

Meanwhile, last year at the summit, OpenStack Foundation launched four new projects, including Airship, Kata Containers, StarlingX, and Zuul. And the Foundation's project management system is organized into two phases, a 'Pilot' and 'Confirmed' model, in order to create a successful community that can collaborate. Currently, four of OpenStack Foundation projects are in the 'Pilot' phase, and OpenStack project is classified as a long term project at the 'Confirmed' phase.

The pilot project chosen by OpenStack Foundation starts with ‘Code’ and enters the 'Confirmed' phase for long-term investment once the community has been created with an incubation period of 18 months and enough time to continue. At this point, the pilot project should be able to participate in the movement of community and open source integration strategies for 'Open Infrastructure', follow the four 'Open' principles, and use the OSI-approved license model. Then, after presenting one or more releases after 18 months and has been approved by the board of directors, the Foundation's long-term investment and support will be provided in the 'Confirmed' project.

▲ These four ‘Open’ principles already are, and will be the fundamental to the Foundation's projects.

▲ 'Community Contributor Awards' was held.

The four ‘Open’ principles, also considered as philosophies that have been around since the beginning of OpenStack, are comprised of elements of source, design, development and community. And of these, ‘open source’ has a number of licensing models to choose from, and the Foundation introduced that it uses an OSI-approved license. The community aspect is a matter of 'accessibility', emphasizing that everybody can access anywhere, and that they are open to any company or individual in their leadership position. The global side of the community is also important, so the Foundation provides tools and technologies that anyone can access and participate anywhere.

In aspect of the development in ‘Open’, every individual change to the code has visibility into the process from the time it had been first written. In the design side of ‘Open’, all ideas have to be reviewed and considered after coding. In addition, while this may seem to give up 'control', it was emphasized that by collecting the opinions of all contributors, ultimately better results will be obtained. Furthermore, ‘Open Design’ enables the true ‘open collaboration’ by opening the process of decision-making to everyone.

It was emphasized that the question of whether this system works well has been proven over the years. In addition, 'Open Design' in open source projects is already being widely used and achieving 'Open Collaboration' around the world. Also, among other open source projects, OpenStack project is already one of the three most active projects in history, along with the Linux Kernel and Chromium. At the same time, the reason why this system can actually be conducted is that all contributors are making differentiation and it is ‘the most democratic’ model that all participants can speak up.

Next, with ‘Community Contributor Awards’ ceremony, Joseph Sandoval, cloud platform manager of Adobe, and member of User Committee, introduced about ‘Mentoring Others to Foster Diversity’. He first pointed out diversity and inclusiveness as elements that allow individuals to feel belonging to the community, and at this point, mentors can further grow diversity. And as a way to become an effective mentor, he recommended sharing experience and using open source as a platform to enable diversity.

▲ Airship project is currently 1.0 RC and aims at releasing 1.0 in Q2 2019.

▲ AT&T showed a demonstration of delivering 5G infrastructure and connecting remote sites right from the field.

One of the pilot projects of OpenStack Foundation, Airship project is a platform for lifecycle management in open infrastructures, providing an end-to-end deployment and update environment for the entire site. The project was started from ‘OpenStack Helm’ in 2016. Airship upstream was begun in 2017 and was added as a pilot project at ‘Vancouver Summit’ in 2018. Through ‘OpenStack Summit Berlin’, Airship project has released 1.0 RC (Release Candidate), and the official 1.0 release is expected to be available in early 2019.

Airship Project is an environment in which users provide lifecycle management such as large-scale deployments and updates in various infrastructure environments such as containers, virtual machines, bare metal, etc., and is especially active in 5G and edge computing environments where numerous remote deployment and management is required. In addition, this project is a user-led project, so AT&T and SK Telecom are leading actively for the 5G environment, NFV, VDI and big data processing. At this summit, AT&T presented the 5G environment deployment and demonstration on the cloud basis by using OpenStack and Airship project.

AT&T stated that the evolution of the network, which was largely a decade-long cycle, is now entering the early stages of 5G, and 5G can accommodate larger capacity, higher reliability, more coverage, lower latency, more devices and a wider range of applications. On top of that, beyond transition of the simple generation, it is now at the key position in the implementation of new applications such as drones, smart factories, autonomous vehicles and AR/VR. And in the implementation of 5G, AT&T utilized OpenStack, helm, Airship, etc. in a network cloud on a software-defined basis, and it demonstrated that it is possible to respond immediately to a failure by deploying a containerized 5G environment on an edge infrastructure node.

▲ ‘Zuul’ started with the development environment of OpenStack, one of the largest open source projects currently.

▲ ‘StarlingX’ has an edge-specific structure.

Zuul is a Project Gating System (PGS), a project derived from the development of OpenStack. And, in a project where a lot of developers are involved, if the code that does not work properly is integrated into the system, the entire project will be destroyed. In this case, Zuul automatically inspects incoming code to make sure it's working properly, and lets people focus on more creative areas. It was also added that 'free software' will need free tools.

The v3 release of Zuul was presented at the last Vancouver Summit. Now, Zuul aims for more general use, rather than just project of OpenStack, and a variety of use cases are coming out. Notable new features include 'Supercedent Pipeline Managers', 'Job Pause', improved usability in mobile environments by rewriting web dashboard in React, and supporting Kubernetes build resources. In addition, BMW was introduced as the leading example of a large-scale use. That is, BMW has effectively deployed Zuul in the global automotive software development environment.

StarlingX has launched its first release on October 24 as an open source edge platform for communications and industrial IOT use cases. It is an OpenStack environment for ‘Edge’, which coordinates components such as Ceph, OpenStack, and Kubernetes, and supplements them to satisfy new requirements such as high availability (HA), QoS, performance and ultra-low latency environments. Moreover, this project has provided a variety of values to solve various problems in real-world use cases, and vRAN in network edge, health care, and transportation were mentioned as the most likely to be used in the future. What’s more, it was stated that StarlingX will do three releases a year for future release plans.

Next, Melissa Evers-Hood from Intel introduced that OpenStack is at the heart of software-defined infrastructures, and in terms of the importance of edge computing, more data will be generated, stored and analyzed on the edge. She also mentioned several technologies of OpenStack ecosystem from this ‘Edge’; ‘StarlingX’, which is OpenStack for edge, ‘Project Cyborg’, which enables direct use of hardware accelerator resources in OpenStack environments, ‘NEMU’, which is a hypervisor for small cloud and edge with no legacy support, and ‘Kata Container’, which is lightweight, fast and safe.

▲ Kata Container complements the lack of 'isolation' of an existing container environment.

'Kata Container' is a technology to reinforce the insufficient inter-container isolation of an existing container environment when sharing the kernel of the host. It can be used as an existing container, but it is a technology that can take advantage of VM's workload isolation and security aspects by inserting a lightweight self-kernel in the container package and connects it with the host through hardware virtualization technology. In particular, the technology can be easily integrated into the management system of an existing container, and the technology focuses on more architectural support, feature extensions, and community extensions.

In addition, Kata Container technology has expanded its supporting architecture from x86 to ARM and IBM p-series, and has improved random number generation and seccomp support options. In the future version 1.4, improved log function, ipvlan/macvlan support through TC mirroring, and NEMU hypervisor support were introduced as plans. Moreover, the Kata Container community is working closely with OCI and Kubernetes communities for compatibility, and is testing regularly in Azure, GCP, and OpenStack public cloud environments.

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, stressed that Canonical not only provides Linux and OpenStack solutions, but also manages OpenStack-based clouds more than any other company. It has supported all individual OpenStack releases and upgrades to date, so if Kubernetes environment is built on the ‘Icehouse’ environment based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, five years ago, it will provide a way to upgrade the OpenStack environment to 'Mitaka' without changing any other parts. After upgrading the OS, it is possible to continue the upgrades of OpenStack. Of course, the latest 18.04 LTS is available for up to 10 years of use, which is a useful option for long-term applications.

And he emphasized that a stable operation for a long time was done entirely of the same code that contributed to the community. Cost-to-performance is also an important part, and now private clouds need to have clear advantages in terms of performance, cost, and security compared to large public clouds. It was said that Canonical is helping enterprise customers build a 'full stack OpenStack' from hardware selection to configuration, deployment and support of an optimized OpenStack environment. He added that the OpenStack, which can be operated with fewer people, will provide clear advantages in terms of cost, and it can also use a multi-cloud strategy with an OpenStack-based full managed cloud.

▲ GPU utilization in the cloud is now available on a complete open source basis.

OpenStack provided ways to directly use GPU and FPGA through Nova and Cyborg for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and HPC, which have recently become very popular. The demonstration of a speech recognition application using GPU in the OpenStack-based cloud was shown. All of the components used in the process of recognizing, translating, and outputting speech in video were open source based, and on the use of GPU on an OpenStack basis delivered several times better performance than the traditional processor.

The use of FPGAs in OpenStack-based environment is possible through the 'cyborg' project. At the Summit, OpenStack showed how to configure the FPGA application environment for video recognition applications based on OpenStack infrastructure. In addition, the Summit's ‘Superuser Awards’ was awarded by Citynetwork. Citynetwork was introduced that it is running OpenStack-based public cloud in eight locations across three continents, with more than 25,000 cores in production and more than 2,000 users.

▲ This year’s ‘Superuser Awards’ was awarded by Citynetwork.

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