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.

▲ Jonathan Bryce, executive director of OSF, and Mark Collier, COO of OSF, hosted the briefing session.

▲ The current progress with OpenStack Foundation Projects

First, the OSF reported that the OpenStack’s community members are more than 100,000 recently and 187 countries and 675 organizations participated in the community. This is an increase of 33% compared to last year, and it can be seen that more community members have been introduced since the establishment of the basis as 'Open Infrastructure'. Moreover, with the expansion of these communities and the emergence of new projects, the OSF emphasized that the four ‘open’ principles, which have been maintained since the foundation, have become a firm standard in project policy and management.

'Open Infrastructure' means using open source-based components to build the latest software defined-based IT infrastructure environment. 'Open Infrastructure', where everything is based on open source, ultimately provides various strengths including flexibility beyond dependencies on specific vendors and technologies, community-based innovation, interoperability between various components, and accessibility to collective intelligence that open source community has. Moreover, ‘Open Infrastructure’ is based on a path from open-cloud native to next-generation applications.

Last year, the OSF first introduced the ‘Pilot Project’ in addition to the OpenStack Project, and then established a system and plan for the management of the pilot project for about a year. Currently, there are four pilot projects, and the policy had been finalized before the summit. The 18-month pilot project will follow the ‘Open Infrastructure’ mission, four ‘open’ principles, and OSI-approved licensing models, and present one or more future releases. If a project is approved by the BoD, it will enter the ‘confirmed’ phase, which offers long-term support and investment from the Foundation. Currently, the OSF is managing five projects, of which only the OpenStack project is classified as the ‘confirmed’ stage.

Mainly focusing areas of the 'Open Infrastructure' strategy by the OSF's projects are data centers, CI/CD, container infrastructure, edge computing, etc. Recently, AI and machine learning have been added, so total 5 areas were introduced. As a process for innovation in the market, a ‘four-stage of integration’ will continue to be applied; a) find common use cases, b) collaborate across communities, c) develop new technologies needed for integration, d) tests in all areas

▲ Various organizations around the world participated in the summit to use OpenStack and share cases.

▲ The latest user survey highlights a wider user base and how to use OpenStack.

▲ One of the reasons for hosting the summit in China in 2019 2H is the growth of the market.

Over the last year, during the release cycle of the latest version of OpenStack, ‘Rocky’, the number of commits reached 70,000, an average of 182 per day, and the open source projects that had been so active were only Linux Kernel and Chromium. Another highlight of the community's activation side is the presence of companies that presented use cases at the summit, including keynote speakers such as BMW, Volkswagen Group, Verizon, and AT&T. The firms in the financial sector such as SBAB and UnionPay also participated in the summit, and in Korea, SK Telecom had prepared a session on the use of OpenStack-based technologies.

In addition, the main content of the recent OpenStack user survey was the growth of OpenStack bare metal cloud, and it was introduced that the integration with Kubernetes led this trend. In a production environment, the use of the OpenStack 'Ironic' has risen from 9% in 2016 to 24% in 2018, and the OpenStack distribution environment based on Kubernetes has been increased up to 37%. What’s more, the survey shows that the multi-cloud OpenStack users highly rely on OpenStack. The most common use was AWS(44%), followed by Azure(28%) and GCP(24%). On average, 58% among these multi-cloud environments are OpenStack based environments.

Furthermore, the diversity of the OpenStack user base was also noticeable in the survey. Organizations that still use OpenStack are related to IT, but this percentage has been slightly down from 44% this year compared to 51% last year. The biggest increase, on the other hand, is 'financial services'. The government and defense division have been increased from 4% last year to 6% this year, while retail and e-commerce segments have been increased from 3% last year to 4% this year. Meanwhile, there was a decrease in the proportion of non-IT related parts, and it is ‘telecommunication’ part, which has been decreased to 10% this year from 13% last year.

On the other hand, China has been ranked as an important market where OpenStack is rapidly growing. China's private cloud market has grown at a CAGR of around 25% for the past three years, with government, manufacturing, and finance taking up large portions. In China's private cloud market, the open source accounts for 70% of the total. OpenStack became an actual ‘standard’ in this market. 4 of the top 5 private cloud vendors and 13 of the top 20 are based on OpenStack. Also, the survey showed that the adoption rate of open source solutions for enterprise users is very high.

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