OpenStack Foundation Grows Beyond OpenStack

During OpenStack Summit Sydney, Jonathan Bryce, the executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, told us in an interview that the foundation will be focusing more on collaboration and openness.

Although the Foundation didn’t make any definitive announcements, Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski guessed that the Foundation was opening up to accepting projects created by OpenStack community members, which means OpenStack could expand as an umbrella organization to host those projects that matter to the OpenStack community.

Renski was right in his assessment, or maybe he knew something we didn’t. On December 5, the OpenStack Foundation announced the first project under the OpenStack umbrella called Kata Containers.

Kata Containers is an Intel project that was designed to unite the security advantages of virtual machines (VMs) with the speed and manageability of container technologies. The project is designed to be hardware agnostic and compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification, as well as the container runtime interface (CRI) for Kubernetes.

Intel is contributing Intel Clear Containers technology, and Hyper.sh is contributing Hyper runV technology to initiate the project. In addition to contributions from Intel and Hyper, the following companies are supporting the project at launch: 99Cloud, AWcloud, Canonical, China Mobile, City Network, CoreOS, Dell/EMC, EasyStack, FiberHome, Google, Huawei, JD.com, Mirantis, SUSE, Tencent, UCloud, and ZTE.

“Kata Containers offers the ability to run container management tools directly on bare metal without sacrificing workload isolation. When compared to running containers on virtualized infrastructure (which is the standard practice today), benefits include increased performance, faster boot time, and cost efficiencies,” said the Foundation in a press release.

When asked, Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation, said that OpenStack is indeed growing as an umbrella organization similar to the Linux Foundation. He stressed that these new projects will remain completely independent and will be managed by their own governance model. However, these projects will benefit from the shared resources of the OpenStack Foundation.

OpenStack has a huge developer ecosystem where companies like Netflix are creating projects to fix their own problems. However, these companies don’t specialize in managing open source software, because their focus is on improving their own services and products instead of babysitting open source projects. Either way, companies hesitate in consuming projects that are owned by competition. The ideal solution is a neutral home for such projects where everyone can collaborate.

Traditionally, when it comes to donating their projects to a neutral party, companies look to the Linux Foundation and Apache Software Foundation, two great organizations that host many great open source projects; however, the ideal solution would be a place within the OpenStack Foundation, where partners, vendors, and users can collaborate on those projects that matter to them.

That’s exactly what the OpenStack Foundation is trying to achieve.