OpenStack restates commitment to core cloud platform as 'open infrastructure' push gathers pace

The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) has assured its contributor community that its repositioning as an open infrastructure advocate does not mean support for its core open cloud platform is wavering.

The past 18 months or so have seen the OSF broaden its focus beyond supporting the creation of open source-based private and public cloud environments by turning its attention to making open source technologies pervasive throughout the entire IT infrastructure stack.

Organisations that go through this process benefit in a number of ways, according to OSF executive director Jonathan Bryce, who used the opening keynote of the OpenStack Summit in Berlin to set out why open infrastructure is a concept it is now championing.

“A lot of companies feel like open source gives them flexibility and gives them options, and that gives them greater control over their business,” he said. “We know that one of the great powers of open source is the ability to take the software and run it in a lot of different ways for your business.”

It is the OSF’s mission to help as many enterprises as possible take advantage of that, because of the competitive advantage it can ultimately confer upon them, he continued.

“When an organisation is able to take those [open source] tools, integrate them successfully and build them, it creates big opportunities for them. One of the biggest is the ability to innovate faster – in some cases, faster than the market – and that can [give them a] competitive advantage,” he added.

“If you don’t have open technologies at an infrastructure level, you lose some of those benefits, even if you’re using open source tools and databases, if – ultimately – you don’t have that flexibility and the ability to change what your infrastructure is doing.”

In parallel to the OSF’s open infrastructure push, its product portfolio has also expanded through the roll-out of technologies designed to help users tackle container management, continuous delivery and edge computing deployments.

It has also made a concerted effort to forge closer ties with other open source communities to help users overcome some of the interoperability challenges that emerge when trying to integrate open source technologies from adjacent communities.

But just because the OSF’s remit has broadened, that should not be interpreted as a sign that the foundation’s support for the core OpenStack platform is wavering, said Bryce.

In fact, support for OpenStack is stronger than ever, he said, with its community of contributors contributing 70,000 updates to it in the past year alone, which equates to 182 code commits a day.

The technology is also being used in 75 public cloud datacentres around the world, he said, and is – according to CCW Research – used by four of the world’s top five private cloud suppliers to support their offerings.

“Just to be clear, we are not running away from OpenStack – for us, open infrastructure starts with OpenStack,” confirmed Bryce.