We are members of the OpenInfra Foundation!

We are members of the OpenInfra Foundation!

This year, we are happy to announce that Fairbanks will become a community member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation. At the Open Infrastructure Summit in Berlin, we will officially announce this. But why do we choose to become a member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation at this moment?
The Open Infrastructure Foundation is known as an open source foundation supporting a global community of 100.000 individuals to build and operate open infrastructure software. With over 100.000 members in 187 countries, the Open Infrastructure Foundation helps open source communities build the tools infrastructure operators need for Data Center Clouds, 5G, Edge, Containers, CI/CD and beyond.

The Open Infrastructure Foundation exists to ensure each open source component is built and tested together, collaboratively, with a radical approach to openness we call the Four Opens: Open Source, open Development, open Design and open Community. From the OpenStack community, where anyone is welcome to contribute, where diverse ideas are shared before the coding begins, when every patch is visible and tested before it lands, to the Source code itself, which is shared with the world: each is critical to how the open source infrastructure is delivered.

The foundation consists of five projects, one of them OpenStack, one of the three most actively developed open source projects in the world, with thousands of developers from over 180 countries. Furthermore, OpenStack powers everything from massively popular games like Overwatch to the largest power company in the world in China, to Workday, to ATT’s 5G networks and beyond (Open Infrastructure Foundation, 2022). As a gamer, I added a background of Blizzard’s Overwatch to the cover of this article. Blizzard Entertainment has been using OpenStack as a private cloud to host its game services since 2012 and use Autoscaling with Overwatch. More information about Blizzard’s keynote can be found here: https://www.openstack.org/videos/summits/denver-2019/how-blizzard-entertainment-uses-autoscaling-with-overwatch.

So, this year, we are happy to announce that Fairbanks will become a community member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation. But why do we choose to become a member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation at this moment? For us the right time is at this moment. We see tremendous growth in the use of open source cloud infrastructure. We see this not only in the cloud orchestration and management area, but also in the containerization, networking, and storage area. Due to this growth, it is important for us to support the Open Infrastructure Foundation and being a part of it.

Furthermore, we see that open source cloud solutions are increasingly being combined nowadays. For instance, in a more recent article that I posted, I wrote about LOKI, which is a combination of Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes and infrastructure. We see this combination being more and more applied in practice, and not only with Kubernetes but also with OpenShift and OKD, resulting in the dependence on OpenStack increasing within organizations. Moreover, we see that open source solutions are deployed with more confidence and faster when companies have a technical extension to their technical teams. Some companies ask for just a call when needed, other companies don’t want to manage the open source software at all. Fairbanks supports companies using open source software like Linux, OpenStack, Ceph and containerization solutions, in all these ways, so we found it important to be a more substantially part of the foundations.

And lastly, in recent years, we have increasingly been asked to also take Edge Clouds into support. Edge clouds are smaller clouds that are orchestrated from cloud infrastructures to provide digital services at a closer distance to the customer. The latest addition to the Open Infrastructure Foundation is the Edge Computing Group. The Edge Computing Group is a working group comprised of architects and engineers across large enterprises, telecoms and technology vendors working to define and advance edge cloud computing.

We are looking forward to continue working with the Open Infrastructure Foundation!

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