Why OpenStack and Kata Containers are both seeing a resurgence of adoption

Suwon, South Korea: Quite discreetly, the OpenInfra Foundation and the open-source projects it promotes (such as OpenStack, and the Kata Containers, virtual machines (VM) as containers) are changing the world. That became clear to everyone who attended OpenInfra Summit Asia.   

OpenStack has long been the top telecom cloud service. You'll never see it as a user, but OpenStack oversees your connection and services almost every time you use 5G on your smartphone with almost every carrier. 

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OpenStack is expanding well beyond the telecoms now, though. The cloud operating system has seen a resurgence in interest and adoption over the past year. Mark Collier, OpenStack's COO told me in an interview, "We've just seen this huge kind of resurgence of interest, and more people coming out, talking publicly about what they're doing with OpenStack."

Several factors drive this renewed enthusiasm.

First, companies are switching from public hyper-clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud, to private clouds. As Younghold Han, Hyundai's VP of car cloud, said in an interview, "There are several reasons why we are using an OpenStack private cloud, hCloud. First, there's data security. Let's remember that a few weeks ago, Azure had a major security failure. We want to control our security. And finally, there's cost. So before Hyundai, I worked in Samsung's mobile business unit. We launched multiple services for our users that ran on AWS, and you cannot imagine how the costs grew exponentially. So we built out our private cloud."

The savings can be considerable. Collier said, "We had one user tell us it was 90% cheaper to build and operate their own OpenStack cloud. Of course, not everyone's going to get that big of a savings, but it can be big." 

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Samsung and Hyundai aren't the only ones moving to private clouds. Michael Dell, Dell CEO, quoted Barclay's CIO Survey 2024: "83% of enterprises plan to move workloads back to private cloud from public cloud." 

Collier agrees. "That tracks with the massive increase in OpenStack demand we're seeing. OpenStack also powers many public clouds globally, but on the private cloud side, we've seen the largest banks in France, along with Geico and Walmart, standardize on OpenStack, and the list goes on and on."

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An additional factor has been Broadcom pushing up the prices for VMware services. According to the cloud analysis firm CloudBolt, 73% of VMware expects more than a 100% price hike now that Broadcom is in charge. The result? According to an OpenStack white paper, numerous companies are looking to replace some of their VMware workloads with OpenStack-based approaches. 

Another reason companies are shifting to OpenStack, especially in the European Union, is digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty is the right of companies and governments to control their data. Quite simply, many countries don't trust their data to United States-based hyper-cloud providers. 

For example, Thierry Carrez, the Open Infrastructure Foundation General Manager, said, "The biggest banks in France are all using OpenStack, and a desire for digital sovereignty and security is largely driving that."

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Another reason so many different kinds of companies are moving to OpenStack is its track record. Collier said, "OpenStack has been proven to work. It's been bulletproof for so many years." In addition, "Thanks to the best practices being documented and the software's maturity, we have one company where each OpenStack administrator covers two data centers. The number of people it takes to operate this stuff has just gone way down. That, in turn, means when the CFO says, 'Can we do it in-house?' The answer is yes." 

That means OpenStack is simply cheaper than its alternatives. 

Kata Containers, another example of a major OpenInfra Foundation project, is also having its moment in the sun. Now seven years old, Kata is gaining traction, particularly for securing AI workloads. 

Kata isn't gaining users just in the OpenStack space. Microsoft Azure is deploying Kata Containers for its confidential computing service, while AWS is talking about large-scale Kata deployment. Moreover, Nvidia is using Kata Containers to secure AI workloads, highlighting its importance in the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence.

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Why? It's simple. Kata Containers' ability to isolate workloads is becoming crucial for digital sovereignty, AI workloads, and security concerns in cloud environments.

Besides better security, Carrez added, "Kata-hosted VMs are better at getting accelerated hardware performance. We have users using Kata containers to get better I/O performance than if they were using a Kubernetes cluster running on bare metal." At least one benchmark, albeit several years old, showed Kata beating bare-metal containers.   

In a presentation, Kata maintainer and Alibaba senior cloud engineer Chao Wu detailed that Kata Containers 4.0 will have even better performance and reduced overhead. That's thanks to Container Device Integration (CDI), a new technique to standardize GPU device access in containers. According to Wu, Kata Containers are more useful and efficient than ever for AI jobs. 

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As OpenStack and its related projects evolve, I expect it to grow ever more successful in an ever wider array of industries. If the surveys are right and companies are shifting to private clouds, I do not doubt that OpenStack will play a vital role in this corporate future.