When we started this adventure 15 years ago, infrastructure software was a proprietary game. AWS was the only real option in public cloud, and VMware ruled the private infrastructure universe. Our aspiration was to collaboratively build programmable infrastructure that was purely open source. We created the Four Opens, the collaborative community principles that still guide us today. We identified the three forces (developers, users, ecosystem) that need to be balanced to maintain a healthy environment around projects. And we created OpenStack, arguably the first open source project to be built from day 0 with the goal of getting thousands of open source contributors from hundreds of companies to efficiently work together. 

Nearly a million commits from more than 10,000 contributors later, we can say we fulfilled that original vision. OpenStack is the de facto standard for open source cloud infrastructure, used all over the world to support all kinds of workloads, allowing anyone, anywhere, to do anything. It was joined under the OpenInfra Foundation umbrella by other open source infrastructure projects: Kata Containers, StarlingX, and Zuul. Together with other projects like Linux, Kubernetes or Ceph, it forms what we call the OpenInfra Blueprint: a 100% open source solution to provide infrastructure.

In 2025, the need for open infrastructure is higher than ever. Meeting increasing security demands has been a concern for a few years already. Digital sovereignty concerns drive a lot of demand for new, local infrastructure. Licensing games played by some vendors make collaboratively-developed open source more appealing than ever. And AI advances fuel demand for accelerated compute capabilities to the tune of another trillion dollars worth of infrastructure. 

We announced recently that the OpenInfra Foundation is joining the Linux Foundation to lean in and accelerate all this recent momentum. To reinforce those collaborations with adjacent open infrastructure communities. To be stronger as we navigate new challenges for our collaborative open source development approach. But also to define the next 15 years of open infrastructure. Because the needs of today and tomorrow are different from the needs from 15 years ago.

Today the world needs infrastructure that can be sovereign, yet interoperable. Infrastructure that is performant, yet secure. Infrastructure that uses latest generation hardware, yet is sustainable and durable. Infrastructure that cooperates more intimately with its workloads, whether those imply containers, AI frameworks or secure enclaves. 

The OpenInfra Foundation is uniquely positioned to provide this foundational infrastructure, this universal, modular, open source pillar on which all those workloads should run.

Like building blocks, our projects work together modularly and seamlessly integrate with other open source infrastructure technologies like Kubernetes and Ceph. As new types of workloads emerge, OpenInfra should continue to integrate technologies and provide the base infrastructure layer inside that end-to-end open source stack. 

This is not going to be easy. The challenges ahead of us are as impressive as the challenges we overcame in the last 15 years. But the OpenInfra community we assembled is the best group I could think of to tackle this. Our developers, our users, and our ecosystem. I’m proud of what we achieved, and I’m confident that, together, we can do it again. #WeAreOpenInfra !