At Ant Group, we believe trust is the cornerstone of every service we provide. As we continue to blend technology and finance in increasingly innovative ways, our mission is to build future-ready digital infrastructure for the service industry—creating small, beautiful changes that impact the world in meaningful ways.

A key pillar of our strategy is open source. We see secure, trustworthy infrastructure as essential to the modern digital economy, and we’re committed to working with the global developer community to accelerate progress.

Our Deep Roots in Kata Containers and OpenInfra

In 2017, Kata Containers was born and donated to the OpenInfra Foundation. Just two years later, Kata became the foundation’s second top-level project after OpenStack, and its core team joined Ant Group that same year. Since then, we’ve remained a proud maintainer and major user of Kata, partnering closely with the OpenInfra Foundation to build a secure, open ecosystem for container infrastructure.

Our commitment runs deep: several key Kata maintainers are now Ant Group employees. Xu Wang, Vice Chairman of our Open-Source Technology Committee, co-founded Kata Containers and has served multiple terms on the OpenInfra Foundation board. Today, Kata has grown into a robust open-source community of 300+ developers and is used in production by major enterprises such as AMD, NVIDIA, IBM Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, and Alibaba Group.

Why Kata Matters to Us

As one of Kata’s pioneer users, Ant Group depends on its unique features, such as network isolation with dedicated kernels and performance jitter control, to meet the stringent demands of our financial services infrastructure.

Our collaboration recently led to a white paper co-authored with the OpenInfra Foundation, detailing how we built a Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) using Kata Containers and eBPF. Many of our developers are also active Architecture Committee (AC) members, shaping Kata’s future and supporting community growth.

Expanding Horizons with The Broader Community

We’re excited about the recent union of the OpenInfra Foundation and the Linux Foundation, which lays strong foundations for cloud and digital infrastructure in the AI era. Ant Group is eager to deepen collaboration with the broader tech community by co-hosting events, co-authoring research, and participating across sub-foundations like CNCF, AI & Data, and CCC Consortium.

Beyond Kata Containers, Ant Group maintains deep engagement with the wider Linux Foundation ecosystem, contributing to and initiating several key open-source projects:

Within CNCF:

• Dragonfly: Peer-to-peer file distribution and image acceleration, which has recently passed the voting process and achieved CNCF Graduated maturity level.
• ModelPack: open standards for packaging, distributing and running AI artifacts in the cloud-native environment.
• KusionStack: Declarative Intent Driven Platform Orchestrator for Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
• KCL: A constraint-based record & functional language mainly used in configuration and policy scenarios.

Within LF AI & Data:

• DLRover: An automated distributed deep learning system for efficient model training and inference.

A recent highlight: In April 2025, Ant Group became the first company in China to win the CNCF End User Award, joining our earlier recognition as an OpenInfra Superuser. We are serious users of leading cloud-infrastructure technologies, including Kubernetes, Harbor, and containerd. These honors reflect our team’s dedication to upstream open-source contributions.

InclusionAI: Open Sourcing AI Innovation

Ant Group is also investing deeply in large language models (LLMs). Through our inclusionAI initiative, we’re open-sourcing LLMs, training/inference systems, and frameworks geared toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Ant Ling team built the core foundation model series of Ant Group’s AGI initiative. We develop foundation, reasoning and any-to-any multimodal models on an advanced Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture (on Hugging Face as Ling 2.0, Ring 2.0 and Ming 2.0), while continuing performing research on frontier models like LLaDA 2.0 with diffusion architecture.

Our Ant Open Source team recently published the LLM Open Source Development Landscape, which will be regularly updated with new insights and ecosystem trends.

Community Engagement

This year, we’re thrilled to continue our active involvement in the OpenInfra community through a series of key events both locally and globally.

In July, we shared insights on ModelPack and the LLM Landscape at the Open-Source Large Models & Infrastructure Forum, held alongside the OpenStack 10th Anniversary Celebration in Suzhou, China.

In September, together with Huawei, Linaro, and China Mobile, we co-hosted a Kata Containers meetup in Beijing to present our CWPP white paper and exchange ideas on securing cloud workloads.

In October, at the beautiful and intellectually vibrant Paris-Saclay, we joined the OpenInfra Summit Europe, where Zvonko Kaiser (NVIDIA) and Xu Wang (Ant Group) delivered a keynote showcasing Kata Containers’ capabilities in securing AI workloads.

During the following days, Ant Group and community contributors delivered several breakout sessions on Kata, the LLM infrastructure ecosystem, and ModelPack, fostering deep technical collaboration.

In the upcoming November 15, in Hangzhou — the “City of Heaven,” once praised by Marco Polo and now a hub of the digital economy, KCD Hangzhou and OpenInfra Days China will join forces for the first time. Ant Group is proud to be one of the key local organizers, with several engineers ready to share real-world open-source practices on stage.

Looking Ahead

As a committed contributor and community leader in open-source infrastructure, Ant Group is excited about what lies ahead. From secure containers to cloud-native platforms and AI systems, we’re proud to work with the OpenInfra Foundation and the global developer community to build the infrastructure of the future, together.