The highlights of the OpenInfra Summit 2023 in Vancouver

In this article you will read,

• what highlights the Vancouver 2023 OpenInfra Summit offered,
• what role LOKI plays in OpenStack's plans
• and how users of the Open Telekom Cloud will benefit from the conference.

From June 13-15, 2023, the OpenStack community once again gathered for its class reunion in Vancouver, Canada, the OpenInfra Summit. Over three days, marketplace, working groups, keynotes and face-to-face meetings offered Open Telekom Cloud representatives the opportunity to exchange ideas and absorb the latest trends. Top technical topics were OpenStack for Artificial Intelligence, containers and LOKI.

Once again, the OpenInfra Summit demonstrated that open source is alive and well: the OpenInfra Foundation is a community of 110,000 people in 187 countries by 2023. The conference was a reflection of the community, in which a mix of old hands and newbies work together: 50 percent of the visitors were there for the first time. Still the most important project: OpenStack – but StarlingX and Kata Containers mark other important developments. But more than that, the broad acceptance of the open source approach shows the success of the initiative. Last year, 40 million cores were productive. In addition to Deutsche Telekom, users such as Walmart and Bloomberg show that OpenStack is winning over users of various sizes in all industries.

2023 focused on three topics: containers, artificial intelligence and the new regional hubs. In addition, service providers of OpenStack-based public clouds, including the Open Telekom Cloud, received exciting impulses for optimizing their offerings. Nils Magnus, Community Outreach Manager for the Open Telekom Cloud and participant of the Summit, sums up: "With what we have seen in Vancouver, we are making our services more automated, more efficient, more scalable and more elegant. First and foremost, our customers will benefit from this."

"In Asia and in Europe, the OpenInfra Foundation has reached critical mass," stated Thierry Carrez, the General Manager OpenInfra Foundation. The Foundation took this as an opportunity to establish two new Regional Hubs, where open source activities will be bundled. In Europe in particular, the hub is also intended to position open infrastructures as part of the discussions on digital sovereignty. After all, open source can play a decisive role in the realization of sovereignty.

Artificial intelligence is and remains the topic of the day – and OpenStack is no stranger to it. "I have never seen so many live demos and practical presentations on artificial intelligence as I have this year," summarizes Allison Price, who as Vice President is responsible for marketing and the community at the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Specifically, Nvidia, for example, reported on the use of Swift object storage for AI workloads. Other attendees demonstrated the use of Terraform and containers for AI. The latter were a particular attraction as Confidential Containers, which completely encrypt the main memory and CPU registers and thus protect them from "nosy neighbors".

The value of containers was already apparent during the AI demonstrations. "Very specifically, we got a lot of inspiration on deploying and maintaining infrastructures for Kubernetes. The trend of the conference: a tech stack called LOKI is emerging. LOKI is an acronym for Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes and infrastructure. The community will standardize the LOKI stack in its next activities and simplify its use," Magnus reports. Second-generation container topics (such as with Kata Containers) continue to be just as highly traded. They convince with extremely lightweight VM-based runtimes and no longer with the approach of namespaces and Cgroups.

OpenStack has established itself as a cloud alternative technology to the proprietary solutions of hyperscalers. A vibrant community continues to drive the open source initiative with future topics such as simplified container usage and for artificial intelligence. The keynotes and many technical presentations are available on YouTube.