We love open source and 2022 was a beautiful year, filled with technical awesomeness and challenges. We are always looking forward, but this time, at the end of the year, let’s look back for a minute.
To look back, we decided to interview some of our lead engineers and colleagues to see what they found particular special this year. In this blog you can read the interview we did with Eric Kessels, CTO of Fairbanks.
What did you find the most remarkable of OpenStack in 2022?
I found the coverage of OpenStack’s growth very remarkable, I did not expect the growth percentage to be so high. According to the 2022 OpenStack User Survey, OpenStack now has over 40 million production cores. Or, in other words, it’s seen 60% growth since 2021 and a 166% jump since 2020. You can see that growth has been driven both by the growing number of virtual instances and because of the use of Kubernetes on OpenStack.
Also, thanks to Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure (LOKI), Kubernetes is now deployed on over 85% of OpenStack deployments. In addition, Magnum, the OpenStack container orchestration service, is also gaining popularity. 21% of users are now running production workloads with it. However, Kubernetes is still everyone’s first choice. 73% of users rely on vanilla Kubernetes, while 12% use Kubernetes via Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution OpenShift.
What is the best development of OpenStack to you, this year?
Most striking for me is that there is a very stable code base from OpenStack. I think it’s positive that the OpenStack Community focuses on improving existing projects instead of adding new projects. This means that the focus of the foundation is on the core of OpenStack and not all surrounding projects. This is a good thing in my opinion.
What did you find a specific challenge for OpenStack?
I found the transition from Open Virtual Switch to Open Virtual Network quite the challenge, because the migration from OVS to OVN involves a redesign of the entire OpenStack network stack. This means that a number of services that normally fall under the OpenStack project have been dropped and replaced by services in OVN.
In the near future, we will actually have to perform this migration for our OpenStack clients. This is a challenge because customers and existing infrastructure must always be online. It is complex but we have excellent migration plans for it.
I also found the Edge Cloud case that we delivered very interesting; particularly the development of a completely independent compute storage and network zone at the Edge locations. For building this Edge Infrastructure, we looked at the StarlingX project first, but eventually decided together with the client to setup OpenStack and write some code (Charm) to make it in exactly the way the client was asking for. At this moment we are writing a blog about this particular use case.
Apart from OpenStack, what was your most positive experience in 2022?
I find the international growth that we are experiencing particularly positive. I am also very positive about our teams and how they work together. The collaboration between our cloud operations teams and the cloud expert teams has improved. Seeing what these teams of engineers achieve together; I am very proud of that.
What developments would you like to see for OpenStack next year?
I would like to make a further improvement in performing Life Cycle Management on OpenStack platforms. Specifically, I would like to improve it by automating it.
Furthermore, what I also find interesting are the sustainability talks that we have internally and within the community and possibly make a further contribution to this.
That was the interview with Eric Kessels. What are your thoughts on the interview and on this year? How was your experience? Let us know in the comment section and let’s discuss how we can make 2023 even better.
