From June 7th to 9th, the OpenInfra Summit 2022 took place: over 800 participants from 65 countries gathered at the Berlin Congress Center. Among the participants was CloudFire, a sponsor of the OpenInfra Foundation. In particular, our colleagues Giulia, Account Manager, and Fabio, Cloud Architect, were present.
For those who didn't attend the summit, here's a brief summary, from our colleagues, of the impressions and highlights from the over 100 sessions held at the summit.
Keynotes
The atmosphere during Keynotes is charged with high expectations right from the start. It almost seems as if the main focus of the event is on the power of the open source model and on how the community is growing more and more through collaboration. Amongst the community, the following main themes particularly stand out:
- Kata Containers;
- Edge Computing;
- GitOps;
- Kubernetes.
After emphasizing the importance and opportunities of the open-source approach and introducing the new Gold partners of the OpenInfra Foundation, the main stage delves into the possible application scenarios of Kata Containers. From here, both the community and Fabio and Giulia perceive how the OpenInfra Community is aware of developing a technology that has effectively become a commodity with high standards of security, flexibility, and stability.
As with every OpenInfra summit, the keynote by researchers from CERN in Geneva stands out particularly in Berlin as well. During their speech, they demonstrate how the OpenStack and Ceph architecture is the primary solution for all their projects, adopted seven years ago and still the first choice to this day.
Keynotes related to security, especially in the field of Edge and Hybrid computing, are also present, along with statistics regarding the adoption of OpenStack by Telco operators worldwide. This adoption, driven by technologies like 5G, essentially requires both high-performing and secure technologies, making OpenStack the de facto standard for these applications.
Talks
There were more than 100 talks and technical sessions throughout the summit, many of them devoted to in-depth discussions of topics such as Security and sharing experiences.
Among these, according to Fabio's opinion, the speech given by OVH engineers stands out - titled - How we integrated L3 services into one of the biggest OpenStack Public Clouds - OVHcloud case study. During this talk, OVH illustrated how they are proceeding with the migration of the entire networking infrastructure of what is, to date, the largest European Cloud Provider.
Equally interesting were the talks presented by RedHat engineers, capable of covering a wide range of topics including deployment, best practices, bug fixes, contributions to community projects, and much more.
Of all the speeches organized and topics covered, those that certainly attracted the most attention from the audience are those related to the use of the GitOps approach in the OpenStack and Infrastructure world. Tools like ArgoCD, Git, and extensive use of pipelines allow for deploying and maintaining complex infrastructures, both full-cloud and hybrid-cloud, in a declarative and self-documenting manner.
In the Dev/GitOps perspective, tools like RedFish are introduced, allowing the management of bare metal to be declarative using APIs such as iDRAC/IPMI, etc.; and Ironic. Both, now independent from the OpenStack product, provide the perfect interface and mechanics for managing bare metal as if they were instances in the cloud. According to our Cloud Architect, both projects have reached a remarkable level of maturity and are able to create a synergy that very few competitors currently achieve.
Finally, there was significant attention from the community towards what is now the new trend: Kubernetes.
There were many talks about how this technology is no longer considered just a "framework" to be used on top of OpenStack installations, but how Kubernetes can also be used as a base infrastructure on which to deploy both full-cloud and edge/hybrid OpenStack environments. Another feature of Kubernetes that was explored and highlighted during the Summit is the control-plane as a tool for managing complex infrastructures in a DevOps approach. In short, Kubernetes is a tool that allows extending the characteristics of the infrastructure stack provided by OpenStack, maintaining all its strengths and addressing the few weaknesses of what is now the de facto standard for Public Cloud, Edge, and Private Cloud solutions with ambitions of becoming Hyperscalers.
In conclusion
An OpenInfra loaded with interesting information. This confirms once again how the community related to the Openstack world is currently at an unparalleled level of maturity in terms of contributors, quality of code produced, security and involvement in huge realities such as RedHat, Canonical, Intel, CERN and more.
A summit that proves Openstack's ability to stay in touch with the new advancements, such as Kubernetes, and to position itself as an infrastructure of reference on which to run this software. Moreover, it positions itself as an additional layer ready to fill its gaps, such as isolation between Pods, a problem that was only possible to solve completely by the instance-based architecture, the beating heart of Openstack.
Looking forward to the upcoming community-related events, happy Cloud to all ☁️💕
