OpenStack Foundation transforms into the Open Infrastructure Foundation

The writing was on the wall two years ago. The OpenStack Foundation was going to cover more than just the OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Today, that metamorphosis is complete. The Foundation now covers a wide variety of open-source cloud and container technologies as the Open Infrastructure Foundation.

Why so long? COO Mark Collier said, "They wanted to be sure they did this right." One reason for this was to make sure they could differentiate their group from The Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which covers much of the same ground. 

The Open Infrastructure Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce said that, "OpenStack is still one of the top three most active open source projects in the world. It's just the landscape of infrastructure and there are many new exciting trends with open becoming more and more ubiquitous."

Simultaneously, Bryce added we used to think the cloud would make:

everything standardized, simplified, it all became about commodity servers with virtual, virtualized workloads, and it was all just going to be kind of this menu-driven thing where the hardware didn't matter, the data center didn't matter, what we've actually seen is that we have more hardware diversification than ever before We have x86 obviously, but we also have ARM, we have RISC. We have specialized accelerators, like GPUs, and FPGAs. 

"The other kind of conventional wisdom about the cloud," Bryce continued, was  "that everything was going to go to these massive centralized data centers. And instead, we see more deployment, diversification, and more modes of running infrastructure than ever before, we definitely have hyperscale clouds. But we have, we have small deployments, all the way out to micro clouds on the edge."

To make use of all these different ways the cloud has evolved requires new software programs and that's where the Open Infrastructure Foundation comes in. The new Foundation's mission is to establish new open-source communities to help bring into production new emerging use cases. This includes AI/ML; CI/CD; container infrastructure; edge computing; 5G; and public, private and hybrid clouds. 

The OIF has over 60 founding members. These include Platinum Members Ant Group, AT&T, Ericsson, FiberHome, Huawei, Red Hat, Wind River, and Tencent. Individually,  the OIF has over 100,000 community members in over 187 countries. Its projects include  Airship, Kata Containers, OpenInfra Labs, OpenStack, StarlingX, and Zuul, and, most recently of all, Facebook and Freedom Fi's Magma 5G project.

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