2024 — A Very Good Year for OpenInfra

Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director, OpenInfra Foundation

In retrospect, 2024 turned out to be a much more exciting year for Open Infrastructure than I anticipated. At the OpenInfra Foundation, we made tremendous progress toward our 2024 goals of protecting the OpenInfra vision of open source, supporting and strengthening our projects, and increasing OpenInfra’s impact. This progress is well documented in the following report, but let me call out a few reasons why I am particularly energized by how the OpenInfra community progressed this year.

First, we’re seeing a resurgence of support and adoption among organizations and individuals who wholeheartedly embrace the freedom and innovation that only open source collaboration provides. Although a few disappointing instances of “anti-open source” behavior have darkened the skies, the silver lining has been a catalyzed community of open source advocates who are letting their voices be heard and investing their time and resources to support open source projects. At the OpenInfra Foundation, we’ve documented substantial growth among all three “forces.” For example, developers continue to add powerful capabilities to our projects to support new workloads such as AI and accelerated hardware; users are driving massive demand for OpenStack and Kata Containers; and the ecosystem of companies providing OpenInfra products and services have created migration solutions to assist companies looking for alternatives to previously entrenched proprietary technology.

Second, the OpenInfra community is stepping up to meet the moment on regional challenges and opportunities. Our regional hubs—OpenInfra Europe and OpenInfra Asia—are actively engaged in addressing unique regional issues around open source. In addition, 2024 marked the launch of regional summits organized “by the community, for the community,” highlighted by a highly successful, sold-out OpenInfra Summit Asia in Suwon, South Korea. The community also stepped up to host dozens of OpenInfra Days and community events throughout Europe, Asia and North America.

Third, the OpenInfra community is having a very tangible impact on shaping the future. This year, we contributed to the effort to define Open Source AI, advocating for permissionless innovation in the spirit of The Four Opens. We also added our voice to regional legislative discussions regarding digital sovereignty and licensing. Most importantly, the support delivered by project teams around AI workloads, hardware enablement, ever-evolving security needs, and improved user experience clearly demonstrates how the OpenInfra community is committed to providing infrastructure not only for today’s demands but also for the revolutionary technological advancements yet to come.

It’s been a truly great year! And together we can make 2025 even better as we work together to deliver the OpenInfra software that drives the global economy and human progress.

Protecting OpenInfra Vision of Open Source

One of the OpenInfra Foundation’s key goals for 2024 was to act to protect OpenInfra’s vision of open source: an incredible engine to drive innovation forward and make it accessible to everyone. This vision is being challenged by a broad set of drivers, including geopolitical tensions, incoming regulation, licensing changes on single-vendor open source projects, and actors diluting the meaning of “open source” by applying it to any publicly released AI model.

The OpenInfra Foundation staff and community actively collaborated to address these challenges through various efforts including:

• Addressing upcoming regulations
• Promoting permissionless innovation
• Pushing community-produced open source
• Furthering diversity and inclusion in open source communities
• Positioning OpenInfra software as a digital public good
• Promoting open, collaborative software development along with individual contributors

Addressing Upcoming Regulations

In 2024, the OpenInfra Foundation was actively involved in defending open source specificity as it was challenged by upcoming regulations, most notably by the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) in the European Union (EU). Foundation staff participated in several key events, including OpenForum Europe’s EU Open Source Policy Summit, FOSDEM’s “Open Source In The European Legislative Landscape” room, and the Open Source Congress. This allowed us to add our voice to that of other organizations in pushing back against certain provisions of the CRA. As a result, the final adopted text is now much more understanding of the specificities of open source developed as an open collaboration under the auspices of an open source steward.

The CRA process is now addressing how to define the "harmonized standards," which translate the requirements set out in the regulation into detailed technical specifications. To follow and influence that critical work, the OpenInfra Foundation joined the Open Regulatory Compliance working group (hosted by the Eclipse Foundation) as a founding member, and Jeremy Stanley, senior principal engineer at the OpenInfra Foundation, has been elected to its Specification Committee as a Foundation member representative.

The OpenInfra Foundation and its regional hubs also follow other incoming regulations in Europe, Asia and the United States. Increasing regulation of open source is a testament to its success, but we must stay vigilant to make sure that legislators understand the specificities and benefits of open source and do not negate them inadvertently due to a lack of understanding.

Promoting Permissionless Innovation

One key aspect of OpenInfra’s vision of open source is that it enables permissionless innovation. The absence of friction in accessing technology creates the enormous demand-side value of open source, estimated at $8.8 trillion USD by a recent Harvard Business School study. This permissionless innovation aspect has been challenged in various ways by organizations claiming to “do open source” without allowing everyone to use the project or its results for any purpose.

We have seen this particularly with new software licenses that claim to be open but contain fuzzy noncompete clauses which make it impossible to build upon. OpenInfra staff is involved with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) where Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation, sits as vice-chair, to defend the Open Source Definition in all of its dimensions. OpenInfra Foundation staff members have been engaging in conversations with the media to denounce those so-called open licenses and the danger that they pose to permissionless innovation. In addition, Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenInfra Foundation, was engaged in OSI’s efforts to establish an Open Source AI definition, helping to ensure that the permissionless innovation aspect of open source software extends to this new field.

Pushing Community-Produced Open Source

Another key aspect of OpenInfra’s vision of open source is that it is produced as a commons, by a community of participants on a level playing field. Unfortunately, over the past few years, we have seen many open source promises broken and restrictive relicensing of open source software by companies that had full control over a given project.

The OpenInfra Foundation pushed back, advocating for the additional sustainability and value of community-produced open source. For example, Thierry Carrez, general manager at the OpenInfra Foundation, delivered at FOSDEM and OW2Con a presentation called “Single vendor is the new proprietary,” which was later published on opensource.net. He also clarified the role of open source foundations in the ecosystem, focusing on this topic in a presentation at the OpenInfra Summit Asia in Suwon.

Furthering Diversity & Inclusion in Open Source Communities

Increasing the diversity of collaboration in its many forms — personal, cultural, geographic and professional — is an ongoing challenge in open source software communities, and supporting improvements in diversity and inclusion is a key activity for the OpenInfra Foundation. In 2024, the community introduced a new Diversity Portal highlighting efforts of the board-chartered Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, including the revision of the Diversity Survey as a significant product of the group’s work for the year. Throughout 2024, diversity and inclusion representatives led Forum, PTG and OpenInfra Days sessions discussing related challenges within OpenInfra project communities and identifying future tasks for overall improvement.

This year the OpenInfra Foundation also continued collaborating with diversity and inclusion organizations to recruit new, diverse talent. The OpenInfra Foundation sponsored one Outreachy intern for the OpenStack community and collaborated with the AnitaB Foundation to host a Level Up Lab. The Lab focused on educating the AnitaB Foundation’s global woman-centered community on being involved in an open source community and the basics of getting started contributing to OpenStack. This was the start of a deeper collaboration in supporting their newer investment into education around open source.

Additional efforts were put into place to accommodate the geographical diversity of the OpenInfra community, given that community members reside in 187 countries. In addition to using asynchronous communication via mailing lists, the OpenInfra community evolved the virtual Project Teams Gatherings to increase accessibility by expanding time zone availabilities that accommodate several regions.

The OpenInfra Foundation continues to encourage community teams to schedule their own time during the PTG. This allows organizers to accommodate the geographic locations (and preferred time zones and work schedules) of active participants on a particular team.

Positioning OpenInfra as a Digital Public Good

Open Infrastructure software has a key role to play in enabling digital sovereignty and local infrastructure all around the world. To that effect, the OpenInfra Foundation staff has been working to position OpenInfra software as a Digital Public Good, aligned with the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. This includes providing feedback to the ‘How to master Europe’s digital infrastructure needs?’ white paper, pointing to the role of open infrastructure in addressing those needs and endorsing the U.N. Global Digital Compact, which is aligned with the OpenInfra mission of making key infrastructure technologies available to all.

Promoting Open, Collaborative Software Development along with Individual Contributors

The OpenInfra Foundation has been providing marketing and outreach support for a podcast hosted by Ildikó Vancsa, director of community at the OpenInfra Foundation, and Phil Robb, OpenInfra Foundation board member. My Open Source Experience podcast aims to uncover challenges, good and bad practices, and success stories throughout the open source ecosystem. The content of this podcast serves as a resource for OpenInfra and other open source communities around the globe.

Ildikó and Phil have been running their podcast since October 2023 and began their second season in September 2024. The podcast features prominent figures and contributors from the OpenInfra community and the open source ecosystem at large.

During the discussions, Ildikó and Phil dive into important topics with their guests, including the bait-and-switch business model, license changes, single-vendor open source projects, the importance of servant leadership, and more.

Support and Strengthen Projects

The second of OpenInfra Foundation’s key goals for 2024 was to act to support and strengthen OpenInfra projects. OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul are all at different stages of a project life cycle and need slightly different forms of support to increase their adoption and keep them healthy.

OpenInfra project and community progress in 2024 can documented in the following ways:

• Cross-project collaboration progress
• OpenStack community progress
• Kata Containers community progress
• StarlingX community progress
• Zuul community progress

Cross-Project Collaboration

Addressing AI-Generated Contributions

As AI-powered assistants get more ubiquitous, the question of how to handle AI-augmented contributions became very important this year. The OpenInfra Foundation Board chair, Julia Kreger, led a discussion that ultimately resulted in the first release of OpenInfra Foundation’s Policy for AI Generated Content. This policy is set to evolve to follow evolution in this fast-changing landscape.

Recruiting Contributors through University Partnerships

The University Partnership Program was officially launched this year to leverage the efforts of students interested in open source in support of OpenInfra communities like Kata Containers and OpenStack. Led by Kendall Nelson, senior upstream developer advocate, leads this program, which includes the following initiatives:

• Boston University: 5 students working on Kata Containers
• City University of Seattle: 4 students working on OpenStack (OpenStackCLI/SDK and Kolla)
• Carnegie Mellon University (Doha, Qatar Campus): 9 students working on OpenStack (Swift and Ironic)
• Dickinson College: 3 students working on OpenStack (Swift)
• North Dakota State University: 3 students working on OpenStack (Manila)
• Oregon State University: 2 students working on OpenStack (OpenStackCLI/SDK)
• Valencia College: 16 students working on OpenStack (QA, Manila, Horizon)

Students worked on a variety of tasks, including improving user and developer experience and extending the functionality of services. Students from Valencia College put together videos, such as this one by Nenad Jovanovic, summarizing their participation. Likewise, mentors who worked with students from Carnegie Mellon shared their experiences working with students so that other community members interested in mentoring would know what to expect.

Lowering the Barriers to Contribute

Efficient communication and workflows are essential to the sustainability of a community. With a focus on OpenStack, OpenInfra Foundation community managers, Ildikó Vancsa, Jeremy Stanley, and Clark Boylan, have been collecting feedback from contributors and contributing organizations to identify and understand workflow bottlenecks and communication inefficiencies may be deterring people from getting and staying involved.

This effort, called "Bridging the Gap,” aims to help projects improve their documentation, communications and processes, making it easier for new and established contributors to get their work done.

OpenDev Collaboratory

The OpenDev Collaboratory made a number of changes and improvements throughout 2024 to support the development efforts of the projects hosted by the OpenInfra Foundation. Etherpad received a major upgrade and Jitsi Meet was redeployed onto newer, more modern servers. The second virtual PTG of 2024 took full advantage of these services, using MeetPad (an Etherpad and Jitsi Meet combination) for the vast majority of PTG sessions. The Gerrit code review service received two major upgrades bringing a number of performance improvements and features like suggested edits.

Within the Zuul continuous integration service, support was added for Ubuntu Noble test nodes, the number of clouds providing nested virtualization labels was expanded, and a new Rackspace Flex Cloud region was added. Unfortunately, the OpenDev team also shut down and removed the Works on ARM ARM64 test cloud region that was managed by Linaro, because the Works on ARM program sunsetted the hardware that supported this test cloud region. The OpenDev sysadmins, including Jeremy Stanley and Clark Boylan, senior principal engineers from the OpenInfra Foundation staff, are happy to work with others to add ARM64 (or other architecture) test nodes to its CI system. Please reach out if this is something you are interested in helping us with.

Ultimately, OpenDev’s goal is to support the projects hosted by the OpenInfra Foundation through the use of open source tooling and open source systems administration. OpenDev users are encouraged to get involved and help make these services better for your needs and for everyone else. If this interests you, please reach out and get involved.

Project Teams Gatherings (PTGs)

The first PTG of the year took place in April and welcomed over 30 teams, including OpenInfra projects, Kata Containers, StarlingX and OpenStack. These teams reported an attendance of over 600 participants in discussions across the week of meetings. Adjacent communities were also in attendance, including OpenEuler and Confidential Containers, each of which had focused discussions on how to more seamlessly integrate with OpenInfra projects.

The second PTG of the year was held in October, with over 220 registrations and a reported attendance of more than 650 participants across the week’s discussions. Not only were Kata Containers, StarlingX and various OpenStack services present, but there were also board-level working groups like the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group among other pop-up teams focused on topics like bridging the gaps in our communities and the removal of Eventlet from OpenStack.

Discussions from the October PTG resulted in significant progress across OpenInfra projects, including:

• Plans for the OpenStack 2025.1 ‘Epoxy’ release coming in April 2025
• Cleaning up of outdated or unsupported technologies (Postgres and Eventlet)
• Plans for Kata 4.0 release and how to reach parity between the Rust and Go versions of the runtime.

For the first time, the OceanBase community held their own meetings to showcase their project and help the OpenInfra community understand the project's benefits. Then, the OceanBase team met with the OpenStack Technical Committee to better understand how to integrate more seamlessly with OpenStack.

OpenStack demand surged in 2024, driven by several global trends: digital sovereignty, licensing changes, and AI requirements redefining infrastructure. While these trends are expected to continue well into 2025, Allison Price, VP of marketing and community at the OpenInfra Foundation, worked with the community to publish new production use cases driven by these trends, including the Dawn Supercomputer, FPT Smart Cloud, Hyundai, KT Cloud, and Lidl (powered by STACKIT). Dubbed a resurgence of OpenStack adoption by tech media, this momentum is expected to increase as more organizations build their infrastructure strategy to power AI workloads and navigate the ongoing disruption in the virtualization landscape.

One of the biggest drivers for OpenStack demand was around IT decision-makers seeking virtualization alternatives as VMware licensing changes impacted the bottom line for organizations worldwide. When we polled OpenInfra members this year, over 80% indicated that an organization had already contacted them about migrating workloads from VMware to OpenStack, and over 60% had already completed a migration. To further educate the market about OpenStack’s viability as a virtualization alternative, OpenInfra members formed a working group that published a landing page and a commissioned white paper developed by Steven J. Vaughan Nichols, an IT reporter.

The OpenStack community oversaw the development of its 29th and 30th on-time coordinated releases: 2024.1 ‘Caracal’ and 2024.2 ‘Dalmatian.’ Included were the first officially supported skip-level upgrade path (directly from Antelope to Caracal), increases in platform and Python language version support, and various improvements for support of bare metal, hardware acceleration and AI/ML workloads.

The secure role-based access control and image encryption efforts had ongoing progress toward completion; five security advisories were issued, culminating in an overhaul of how server image validity is assured; and maintainers embarked upon an arduous journey toward finally replacing OpenStack’s underlying service concurrency library.

Two elections for OpenStack’s technical governance (2024.2 and 2025.1) were held as scheduled in 2024, filling 9 seats with active contributors employed by 6 different organizations. During the first TC election of the year, one of the winning candidates graciously stepped aside in order to avoid having too many seats occupied by employees of any one organization.

Preparations are beginning for a celebration of the project’s 15th birthday in the coming year.

The Open Infrastructure Blueprint (combining Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes) is a common open source software architecture deployed by hundreds of organizations around the world. In 2024, the OpenStack community collaborated with other parts of the OpenInfra community, along with adjacent open source communities, to develop the Open Infrastructure Blueprint Whitepaper. This whitepaper outlines the use of a fully open source stack composed of OpenStack, Linux and Kubernetes to meet the rigorous needs of a variety of use cases. Representatives from a number of our member companies shared case studies and reference architectures to further elaborate on the capabilities and benefits of using these technologies together. Examples include Huawei’s Dual Engine and H3C’s CNOOC Cloud.

The Kata Containers community has been focusing on improving not just the code, but also the processes, tools and workflows that contributors have been using to further strengthen the project.

Contributors significantly improved the process to cut minor releases; the suppression of the stable branch greatly simplified the release flow and allowed for a monthly cadence. This was an important change for the vitality of the project because it enables more community members to help out for the long term with releasing new versions of the runtime. The frequent minor releases are allowing users to move forward quickly to pick up bug fixes and feature enhancements as they become available.

The Kata Containers blog was moved from Medium to GitHub, where it will be hosted along with the rest of the website's source code. While this change is visible to readers, the most significant benefit of this move is that it will provide a simple process for contributors to add new articles to the blog.

The community has a staggered election process to allow new leaders to join the project’s Architecture Committee (AC) while ensuring continuity in leadership. In 2024, the community ran two AC elections, during which the committee gained new members and retained established leaders within the Kata Containers community. The AC consists of seven seats and currently represents six organizations around the globe: Ant Group, IBM, Microsoft, Nubificus Ltd, NVIDIA and Red Hat.

As the community works toward a 4.0 release, contributors have made significant progress toward that milestone. They have worked toward feature parity between the original Go runtime and the new Rust-based runtime, cleaned up the code base that implements the integration with the Confidential Containers (CoCo) project, improved CI/CD tooling and test suite, and more.

As in past years, the community also dedicated time to participating in university mentorship programs. In the second half of the year, mentors from the Kata Containers community worked with students from Boston University to create a dashboard for and further improve the project's CI/CD framework. Horace Li, China community manager at the OpenInfra Foundation, organized a Kata Containers meetup, which China Mobile hosted in December 2024, to share use cases and increase awareness of the innovation happening around container security.

The StarlingX community concluded a strong year in 2024, including 2 major releases and delivering important functionality to new and emerging use cases that rely on large-scale, high-performance, open-source cloud infrastructure.

The community enhanced and strengthened the platform in the following areas:

• Scalability
• Security
• Management and operations
• Distributed cloud

In 2024, the community put significant effort into keeping up to date with the latest versions of the integrated components of the platform, while also enhancing the services that are designed and developed by the StarlingX community, like the Flock services, to provide all the necessary components to deploy, operate and maintain a distributed cloud platform.

The OpenStack subproject experienced significant growth in the second half of 2024, which will allow the team to move faster with integrating newer versions of OpenStack into StarlingX, while also adding new features and enhancing testing in this area.

To ensure continued leadership while also giving the opportunity for new leaders to arise, the community conducted two Technical Steering Committee elections and one Project and Technical Lead election throughout the year.

The project continued to grow in production use in the telecommunications segment, including Boost Mobile, a new production use case announced in December. At the same time, the community has been exploring potential use cases in sectors such as automotive and industrial automation to further increase the platform's adoption.

2024 was a year of improvements for Zuul’s users. Across two major releases and many more feature releases Zuul made many changes, including:

• Reimplementation of circular dependency handling to make it a first-class feature
• Rewrite of the web dashboard to make it more responsive and enable consistent filtering
• Job configuration improvements to make it easier to execute jobs exactly how you want
• Update of supported Ansible versions to catch up with upstream Ansible
• Steady improvements in Nodepool drivers, particularly the AWS driver

Zuul tests these features in production as they get implemented through a collaboration with the OpenDev Collaboratory’s sysadmins to deploy the latest merged code weekly. This ensures features are well-tested before they reach your deployments.

Looking ahead to 2025, a major new feature Zuul operators can expect is the “Nodepool in Zuul” functionality. This will bring a new Zuul component obsoleting the existing Nodepool services. Image builds will be managed with Zuul jobs and artifacts, giving operators much more flexibility and control over how images will be built.

Increase OpenInfra Impact

The last of OpenInfra Foundation’s key goals for 2024 was to increase OpenInfra’s impact. We reviewed all of our activities with an eye toward reinforcing the OpenInfra brand and increasing awareness and participation around the OpenInfra mission.

To achieve this, the OpenInfra Foundation staff and community dedicated time to:

• Reaching more people through online and offline methods
• Growing the OpenInfra ecosystem to address software demand
• Advancing OpenInfra in Europe and Asia regions
• Elevating the OpenInfra Brand
• Positioning OpenInfra within the broader open source ecosystem

Reaching More People through Online and Offline Methods

Throughout 2024, the OpenInfra Foundation staff collaborated with the global community and members to create awareness among more individuals and organizations throughout the world. By leveraging online and offline strategies, the team was able to expand OpenInfra’s reach into new open source communities as well as new cities and countries.

Events are a primary way for the community to share the latest in open infrastructure, network with fellow community members, and share common learnings around building and deploying open source software.

The OpenInfra Summit evolved into a regional event in 2024 to increase accessibility upon hearing feedback about global travel restrictions. The first regional OpenInfra Summit Asia was held in Suwon, South Korea, and welcomed a sold-out crowd of 1,500 attendees. To further increase the reach of the OpenInfra mission, the event was colocated with the OCP regional APAC Summit and the Ceph Community Days Asia, bringing in new attendees and sponsoring organizations.

Nine OpenInfra Days and 47 OpenInfra meetups were also held in 2024 to provide more local access and exposure to OpenInfra use cases and learnings. Over 2,000 individuals attended these events, expanding the reach of current OpenInfra news and trends. To support these events, Helena Spease, community programs manager at the OpenInfra Foundation collaborates closely with regional and local user groups. Over 50 groups around the world composed of volunteers are an integral part of getting the OpenInfra message to as many people around the world as possible. This year, two new groups representing Kenya and Myanmar were added.

Through the OpenInfra University Partnership Program, new universities also began exposing students to OpenStack in the classroom. Dickinson College started recommending OpenStack as a potential project for students to focus on for their yearlong course on open source development. Now, there are six students there working on Swift and Octavia. A student at City University of Seattle began working on OpenStack on their own in August of this year and has since introduced four other students to OpenStack as well. The University Partnership Program will continue to identify universities and support students from all around the world in learning about OpenInfra projects and what it means to be an open source developer, thereby emphasizing the Four Opens, growing our impact and setting an example for other open source communities.

Between, and even during, events, OpenInfra community members convene online to collaborate and educate each other. While over 121,000 individuals have joined the OpenInfra Foundation as a community member, the channels and platforms managed by the community and staff have an even larger reach. This includes over 200,000 social media followers, over 55,000 OpenInfra newsletter reads, and over 1 million individuals who have visited an OpenInfra Foundation web property.

Growing the OpenInfra Ecosystem to Address Software Demand

The OpenInfra Foundation has seen a resurgence of interest from companies that are now highlighting OpenStack as a key part of their business. Led by Jimmy McArthur, Rackspace and Okestro joined as OpenInfra Platinum Members and Mirantis returned as a Gold Member of the OpenInfra Foundation. In addition, he brought on twelve new Silver Members of the Foundation, some of whom are from new-to-the-Foundation industries, such as open source networking company VyOS or Hydrolix, which does streaming data log mining. The OpenInfra Associate Member program also grew by 30% in 2024 to 35 members, and we’re looking forward to closer collaboration with these valuable research and university partners as well as adjacent open source communities.

By far, the most significant resurgence factor has been around the massive disruption of the virtualization market resulting in organizations exploring VMware to OpenStack migration. Six new OpenInfra Foundation Members joined up specifically to be a part of our VMware to OpenStack Migration Working Group, and they were joined by over 25 existing OpenInfra members to support the creation of a VMware Migration White Paper. GEICO, the United States' second largest insurance company, has made VMware migration to OpenStack a pillar of their data center strategy moving forward and was a key use case for this campaign. We expect this member and end-user momentum to not only continue, but increase in 2025.

Advancing OpenInfra in Europe and Asia Regions

2024 was the first full year of operation for our regional hubs in Europe and Asia, demonstrating the power of focused regional collaboration in advancing open infrastructure. Established in 2023, these hubs served as bridges between local communities and global initiatives while addressing specific market needs. Their success validated the Foundation's strategy of strengthening regional representation and collaboration through quarterly Advisory Board meetings that drove strategic objectives.

OpenInfra Europe made significant strides in strengthening the voice of the European open infrastructure community. The hub focused heavily on upcoming EU regulation, particularly in demystifying the Cyber-Resilience Act (CRA), while refining our response to regional digital sovereignty concerns. This work was especially crucial in a context where many stakeholders assume only U.S.-based hyperscalers can provide solutions. The hub also successfully captured growing momentum through the coordination of the special OpenInfra Days Europe series across the continent, creating additional opportunities for regional collaboration and knowledge sharing.

OpenInfra Asia built strong momentum throughout the year, led by representatives from OpenInfra Foundation Platinum members like Ant Group, Huawei and Okestro. A crowning achievement was supporting the sold-out OpenInfra Summit in Suwon, South Korea, cohosted with the Open Compute Project (OCP). This unprecedented gathering of open infrastructure leaders showcased the region's growing influence in the global open source software and hardware communities. Beyond the Summit, the hub focused on analyzing regional contribution trends across all OpenInfra projects and developing strategies to reinforce regional engagement.

Both hubs excelled in their roles as regional amplifiers of OpenInfra messaging while serving as crucial conduits for communicating regional perspectives and requirements to the global OpenInfra community. Their success in bridging local and global interests has established a strong foundation for continued regional growth and collaboration.

Elevating the OpenInfra Brand

Although it has been a few years since we migrated from “the OpenStack Foundation” to “the OpenInfra Foundation,” the OpenInfra brand still needs reinforcement.

To that end, OpenInfra Foundation staff presented at several industry events in 2024, including OW2Con, Open Source Summit EU, OpenEuler Summit, Open Source Summit NA, ALASCA Summit, NetworkX and All Things Open. Some of those presentations were specifically focused on what Open Infrastructure is and what the OpenInfra Foundation does; an example is Thierry Carrez’s presentation at All Things Open, “Why Open Infrastructure matters."

To support and grow online engagement around the OpenInfra brand, Wes Wilson, VP of operations at the OpenInfra Foundation, spearheaded the OpenInfra Foundation’s transition from openinfra.dev to openinfra.org as its primary domain. This strategic move, initiated in mid-2023, represented more than a simple URL change — it marked the organization’s continued evolution and growth since its 2020 rebranding as the OpenInfra Foundation.

The migration plan was communicated to the community, outlining the phased approach with the goal of ensuring minimal disruption. The OpenInfra Foundation's website, mailing lists, and board governance wiki were the first to transition and will be followed by the OpenInfraID services and staff email systems in early 2025. This transition strengthens the OpenInfra brand and consolidates the Foundation's online presence, all while maintaining its commitment to accessibility and user experience.

We also engaged in proactive media relations to get OpenInfra quoted in top-tier technology publications, including CIO, Cloud Native Now, IT Pro, TechCrunch, The Register, and ZDNet.

Positioning OpenInfra within the Broader Open Source Ecosystem

In 2024, the OpenInfra Foundation launched a new initiative called the OpenInfra Universe to showcase the broader open infrastructure landscape beyond projects that are directly hosted at the OpenInfra Foundation. This directory highlights open source solutions that power or rely on the Open Infrastructure Blueprint (Linux, OpenStack and Kubernetes) across diverse use cases, including edge computing, container infrastructure, public/private hybrid cloud, AI & machine learning, CI/CD and more. While it is intended to be as open as possible, the OpenInfra Universe does have a few specific requirements for inclusion: projects must be openly licensed with an OSI-approved license, provide infrastructure software, and have at least one organization integrating it with an OpenInfra project.

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the OpenInfra Foundation is committed to expanding the OpenInfra Universe to better reflect the rich ecosystem of open infrastructure solutions. This initiative not only reinforces OpenInfra’s fit within the larger open source ecosystem, but also increases visibility for compatible projects and strengthens the OpenInfra brand by demonstrating its central role in the broader open source infrastructure community. Through continued outreach and collaboration with the open source community, we aim to make the OpenInfra Universe a resource for organizations seeking to build end-to-end open source infrastructure solutions.

Continuing OpenInfra Momentum in 2025!

In the face of new challenges that may arise and ongoing demand surges, the OpenInfra community is committed to furthering the OpenInfra mission of supporting open source communities who build software that runs in production. As 2024 closes and 2025 begins, the OpenInfra Foundation staff and community are excited to fuel this momentum through continued ecosystem diversification and growth, increased project awareness and adoption, and supporting the global OpenInfra community in building impactful open source infrastructure software