All of us like new shiny objects as mature and stable are usually boring. But that’s what the world runs on — mature and boring stuff. Like OpenStack. So what’s ‘new’ in the boring OpenStack ecosystem, what’s new at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, the new name of the OpenStack Foundation?  To explore answers to some of these questions, we sat down with Jimmy McArthur, Senior Manager of Community & Business Development at Open Infrastructure Foundation.

We talked about a wide range of topics; some of those are mentioned below:

• Jimmy took over a new role at the foundation and we discussed what this new role entails?
• Why did the foundation change its name and what does the new name mean?
• What are some of the core open-source projects at the foundation built around or for OpenStack?
• We then talked about the trends and adoption of OpenStack technologies Jimmy has seen in the last few years?
• Microsoft recently joined the foundation. What is the Azure maker doing at the foundation?

Check out the full video above.

Guest: Jimmy McArthur (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Open Infrastructure Foundation (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFiR lets talk. And today we have with us, Jimmy McArthur, senior manager of community and business development at Open Infrastructure Foundation, Jimmy, it’s great to have you on the show.

Jimmy McArthur:  Hi Swap, thanks for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So I will just start with you since you are here, talk about how, what are your new responsibility? What are you doing at the foundation these days?

Jimmy McArthur: Sure. Yeah, so I’ve taken over the community and business development for the foundation and primarily working with relationships with our silver, gold and, platinum members and also new business development.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now let’s talk about the foundation because before this pandemic, actually it was almost a year or so, you folks changed the name from OpenStack Foundation to Open Infrastructure Foundation. And you folks also call yourself Open Infra. I want to know a bit about what the reason behind name change and what does the Open Infra stand for today?

Jimmy McArthur:  Sure, Yeah. So the reason the name changed is we saw some need for broadening our horizons within our community. You know, our de facto open source platform for cloud computing is OpenStack, obviously, but as we saw things expand and the need for Open Infrastructure kind of grew around OpenStack and the needs of our users changed. We wanted to make sure that we had a hand in helping bring projects that fell under Open Infrastructure, into production and in an open source way, in a way that we do things at the Open, formerly the OpenStack Foundation.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah, I do remember that time. But they were back in… You folks, you took on adjacent projects, so those projects are the ones that, not everybody’s using just OpenStack. You know, there are so many other components, right. It does make a sense to not only become exclusive, but it also reflected a name that is beyond just OpenStack. And there are so many projects out there. So if I ask you, if you can, I mean, first of all, there are so many projects, so I don’t want to get into every project there, but if you can name some of the core project that you do see are playing a big role in this whole community or ecosystem of Open Infrastructure or around OpenStack.

Jimmy McArthur: Sure. Well, Kata Containers was brought to us because open source projects want to follow the OpenStack way of developing in the open. So that’s, Kata Containers is the speed of containers with the security of VM. So that’s played heavily into part of the area in Open Infrastructure that we’re expanding to. And then we think of Open Infrastructure as everything from the machines that set at the data center to the Edge now. Which is, a long way from where things were 11 years ago when we launched the OpenStack project. So at the Edge, we’ve got StarlingX and Airship that also work to send what we’re calling low key, which is Lenox OpenStack, Kubernetes on infrastructure. And so those, I think those are at least three of our projects that I think are worth noting and really spell out how that Open Infrastructure ecosystem works.

We’ve also got Zuul, which is our C-I-C-D project. And it started out as an OpenStack, as part of a tooling for OpenStack. And then we realized that it sort of worked as a standalone project. And then we have OpenInfra Labs, which is, it’s basically a couple of things. But first it operates on the, operate first principle, which says that operators in and of themselves are part of the core strength of the project. And also it’s a test bed for researchers and universities.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If I ask you, if you can quickly talk about, in the last one or two years, what have you seen in this space in terms of adoption of open and switched foundation technologies?

Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, I would tell you OpenStack is alive. We’ve seen 25% growth in our foundation. You mentioned Microsoft. We also have a new gold member NIPA, which is a tied public cloud. And speaking of growth, we have a massive growing public cloud footprint. You know, you look at data sovereignty rules around the world in Europe, Southeast Asia and China, and those data sovereignty rules call for a different type of solution. And that solution is OpenStack. It’s the kind of the defacto standard. If you want to store your data privately and manage your data privately and securely, open source is the way to go. And it’s what people are adopting. We’ve seen 175 data centers with 80 public clouds around the world. And that’s just the ones we know about. So it’s definitely rapidly expanding. We’ve got 25 million cores in production. That’s a 66% increase year over year. So last year we had 10 million cores. It’s exploding.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now, Let’s talk about some new members. Of course, you have new platinum member, Microsoft. What is Microsoft doing at Open Infrastructure Foundation?

Jimmy McArthur: Sure. Yeah. You know, I think we talked about why we became the Open Infrastructure Foundation and that’s because we broadened our scope of it beyond OpenStack. And I think as a result of that organizations like Microsoft and even AWS have taken an interest in what we’re doing. Microsoft is working very closely with us. They’re in fact, they’re giving a talk at our upcoming event on November 17th and 18th, specifically around the four open. So, Microsoft is interested in the Open Infrastructure Foundation because of the way we do open source.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I still miss those OpenStack days, or events, in person event, you folks know how to party. Well, you also know how to set up a good, show as well. And I want to go back to those events. So what’s in the pipeline? What are you planning next in the post pandemic world?

Jimmy McArthur: Yeah, absolutely. You know, hopefully, assuming everything goes well in June next year, we’ll be in Berlin. It’ll be our first in-person event and over two years, and we’re definitely excited to get our community back together and really start to work on that, the open community and the open development aspects of what makes the Open Infrastructure Foundation tick.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Jimmy, thank you so much for taking time out today and not only talk about the foundation, the evolution of the foundation, the community, the ecosystem, your new role, and also that we should look forward to going back to, the new norm, whatever it is. And I look forward to, of course attending the event in Berlin, but I also hope to see you before that. So thank for your time today. And I look forward to our next conversation. Thank You.

Jimmy McArthur: Thank you, Swap. I appreciate it. And don’t forget to catch us on OpenInfra live November 17th and 18th.

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