[OpenStack Foundation] Update on Strategic Focus Area Progress since Sydney

Jonathan Bryce jonathan at openstack.org
Tue Dec 5 19:44:06 UTC 2017


Hi everyone,

Before the OpenStack Summit Sydney, I sent an update about some new things we wanted to work on and support at the OpenStack Foundation. During Sydney, we agreed on a set of problem domains we wanted to organize communities around that had a lot of overlap with our mission for building open infrastructure. We’re calling these Strategic Focus Areas, and the initial set included datacenter cloud infrastructure (most of the existing OpenStack projects), container infrastructure, edge computing infrastructure and CI/CD infrastructure. We’ve made some progress in these areas in the last few weeks and I wanted to provide an update.

Container Infrastructure
The Containers SFA is important because there are problems to be solved in the "last mile" of putting containers into production that really matter to cloud operators and that are not yet addressed by the app dev focused tools layer.  This SFA is the first to include a pilot project, called Kata Containers, which opened up for broader collaboration this week ahead of KubeCon. This project is being kicked off by code from two existing open source projects: Clear Containers and RunV, which were started by Intel and Hyper and have been in development for 2-3 years. These projects decided they wanted to join forces to build a unified effort to create a secure container runtime. I'm excited to see 22 companies--including many existing OpenStack companies and also some new organizations--have signed on to support the initiative. This is an encouraging sign regarding our early efforts to drive open infrastructure solutions in the container space by focusing on solving problems for cloud operators. Find out more or get involved here: https://katacontainers.io/
    
This is at the container infrastructure layer, and thus sits beneath (and works well with) application-centric container tools like Docker images and Kubernetes pods and supports standards like OCI and CRI-O. This layer of container tech doesn't get as much hype as the app tools, but is vital to operating secure containers at scale without resorting to full VMs for isolation and is thus a natural fit with our other efforts.

Edge Computing Infrastructure
We've continued to see huge interest and action around Edge Computing following the succesful OpenDev event in September. We've established a mailing list ( http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/edge-computing ) and are kicking off weekly meetings to start to drive progress. Our first meeting had 40-50 people join and we laid out several work streams and identified teams to help move them forward:
- OpenStack Gap Analysis
- Cross-community collaboration
- New project consideratios (what new tech is needed? how can we help?)

If you’d like to get involved in these areas or edge in general, please join the mailing list. We will have additional focus on this at the next Summit in Vancouver.

CI/CD Infrastructure
Software development continues to be a popular use case for OpenStack, and we've seen an explosion of open source tools in this space. This area is still fairly nascent but one that we are starting to work with the existing teams in our community like ZuulV3, as well as reaching out to our users and other tools and communities to see where we can best help drive open solutions. To accelerate efforts in this area, we are considering focusing the 2018 OpenDev event on the CI/CD space. Stay tuned for more details.

Thanks again to everyone who has been participating in these efforts and providing feedback around it. I am very excited to see what 2018 brings for us. As always, if you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to send them my way,

Jonathan
+1-210-317-2438


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