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[OID Korea 2018] ‘OpenInfra Days Korea 2018’ Keynote Address

  • Tuesday, July 24, 2018, 7:17 am
  • ACROFAN=Yong-Man Kwon
  • yongman.kwon@acrofan.com
OpenInfra Days Korea 2018, co-hosted by OpenStack Foundation, OpenStack Korea User Group and Cloud Native Computing & K8S Korea, will be held on June 28-29 at COEX in Gangnam- gu, Seoul. This event was developed from 'OpenStack Day Korea' as a part of efforts to promote various open infrastructure technologies and to revitalize related ecosystem.

The event will be held under the theme of "Open Infrastructure: OpenStack, Containers, and Cloud Native Computing”, and it will cover the ecosystem of open infrastructure technology created by combining openStack and cloud native computing technologies such as Kubernetes and Container. The OpenStack Foundation, as well as global open source foundations such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Open Networking Foundation (ONF), will participate in the event, and technical presentations, exhibition booths, and workshops will be held under the sponsorships of Samsung Electronics, SK Telecom, NetApp, manTech, and Open Source Consulting.

At the event’s keynote address, Mark Collier, COO of OpenStack Foundation, pointed out ‘diversity’ as the future direction of the cloud, and from the perspective of the community beyond the infrastructure, he introduced that OpenStack is focused on introducing and integrating new technologies to solve the problems that users are facing. Also, in this integration strategy, he suggested four steps; finding common user cases, collaborate across communities, build the required new technology, and test everything. At the same time, the Foundation announced the long-term support version of OpenStack and the introduction of functions such as fast forward upgrade.

 
▲ Mark Collier, COO of OpenStack Foundation

 
▲ Now, the ‘long-term support version’ will be provided to OpenStack community version.

Mark Collier COO and Lauren Sell, Vice President of Marketing and Community Services, gave keynote speech of OpenStack Foundation. First, the Foundation introduced some results of user survey that the infrastructure currently running in OpenStack environment is more than 10 million cores, and 71% of users who are using OpenStack are in production environment or preparing to deploy to production environment within the next 12 months. It is added that its market size is about $6.1 billion.

Currently, OpenStack Foundation is running a variety of software projects centering on OpenStack. Recent noteworthy news in these projects was that vGPU support was provided in the virtual machine environment "Nova" and expected to be useful in a variety of use cases. In addition, the offline "Fast Forward Upgrade" allows users to upgrade from originating version to user desired final version for multiple releases at one time. Also, from the OpenStack "Ocata" version, a long-term support version, which provides 18 months of additional support, will be presented to meet the needs of users.

OpenStack is currently used not only for data center and enterprise but also for scientific research and infrastructure operation such as traffic. Also, as it is used in various areas, the requirements for OpenStack, cloud, and infrastructure have changed a lot from the past. Today's infrastructure requires more, such as AI, containers, machine learning, and serverless technology, and these functions are used at the edge level beyond the data center. In addition to the existing standard architecture, architectures are being diversified into ARM-based environments, or environments that user GPUs and FPGA, and various open source solutions are used together.

 
▲ Lauren Sell, Vice President of Marketing and Community Services of OpenStack Foundation

 
▲ The four stages of integration for 'open infrastructure' flow like this.

In the early days of the cloud, everything seemed to be merged on a standard hardware foundation, but now the movement of the cloud is becoming more "diversified" into various architectures. Moreover, various technologies such as AI and machine learning, which are used to solve various problems, are based on open source. However, the foundation emphasized that open source is not enough, and that it needs more than code to transform into an 'open infrastructure'. At this time, the foundation and the community are the best players in solving this problem through cooperation, and what the foundation has learned from communities in building an open infrastructure is that it is ‘human' that ultimately runs the infrastructure.

To these changes, the foundation and the community are responding with strategic changes. In the past, the foundation thought about infrastructure from the perspective of an OpenStack project, but it is now thinking from the perspective of the 'community'. In the case of the community, it is featured by using various new technologies besides OpenStack in approaching the problem. As for difficulties in open source and infrastructure, "integration" is pointed out, and it is explained that new strategies for this part to help integrate technologies are discussed last year. Also, the “four steps for integration”, which includes identification of common use cases, collaboration, incorporation of new technologies, and the general testing, is defined.

In identification of common use cases, various organizations have participated in introducing white papers relating to containers and edge clouds. After understanding the use cases, collaboration among communities is needed. There a lot of technologies to integrate, so the foundation stated that it can help with smooth integration by establishing relationships with various communities and identifying the deficiencies of each other through collaboration. The white paper on the edge cloud has worked with a variety of organizations, and it was helped by the Kubernetes upstream community. Moreover, the foundation provided resources to the Kubernetes community.

New technologies and projects may be needed to overcome poor technology after collaboration. And the OpenStack Foundation has been leading the OpenStack project since 2012, and last year it had just launched a new main project besides the OpenStack project. The new projects are "Kata Containers" and "Zuul”. What’s more, it is announced that “StarlingX” and “Airship” projects will soon be available as well.

 
▲ “Kata Containers" and "Zuul" are presented as the new main projects of OpenStack Foundation.

'Kata Containers' is a virtualized container technology that can provide performance of containers, isolation of VMs and security. There were some voices that the existing container technology, which is isolated at the domain level while sharing kernels of the host, are insufficient in isolation. Hence, in some cases, the container platform was mounted on VM and the container was operated. Kata Containers is a technology that can take both the isolation of virtualization and the efficiency of container by utilizing virtualization technology into container isolation. It is an open standard project that combines ‘runv’ of Hyper.SH and Intel’s ‘Clear Container’ project. A new thing for this project is that Google, Microsoft, Huawei and others are taking the leadership, and it was evaluated positively in terms of collaboration opportunities with companies.

The project that has been for six years, Zuul’s latest release is version 3, and it is said to be an important project in the foundation. Zuul is a technology developed for the community in OpenStack community, used for software development and testing, and it is one of the largest open source project CI systems. It is characterized by the ability to implement continuous test workflows in complex projects in distributed environments involving thousands of developers from hundreds of countries. Individual tasks are written in Ansible. They support Gerrit and GitHub and can be used outside of OpenStack.

The startup project, StarlingX, is a project for edge computing and industrial IoT, with Wind River and Intel collaborating on code, and the mailing list is being actively operated. Mainly hosted by AT&T and participated in by SK Telecom in Korea, “Airship” project implements all pipelines for the installation and configuration of OpenStack environment as a container and a cloud native platform, centered on Kubernetes. When the server comes in and connects, it automates the whole process of deploying the container and configuring the functionality, and it enables to implement this process as a single declaration. Meanwhile, SK Telecom is also contributing code in related projects and applying it to the actual working environment.

 
▲ Lee Je-eung, President of The Linux Foundation Korea

Next, Lee Je-eung, President of The Linux Foundation Korea, briefly introduced about Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It was established in December 2015 as Linux Foundation-affiliated project foundation, and it coordinates policy and direction aspects of various cloud native projects centered on Kubernetes. There are currently 23 projects under management. In addition to the Kubernetes, which had already entered the mature stage, 16 projects in the upbringing stage and 6 projects in the early ‘sandbox’ stage are being managed. CNCF also supports activities such as transference to the next stage through testing.

The move from virtualization to cloud-native is focused on optimizing resource utilization through orchestration among containers by breaking down applications into micro-services and packaging them into individual containers. In the process, CNCF provides political management to connect various related projects through open source-based collaboration in the move to cloud native. Meanwhile, it has more than 240 members involved in the cloud-native ecosystem.

As the reasons for participation, CNCF cited neutral contribution and activation, provision of selection, validation and support of projects through Technical Advisory Committee, and opportunity to share much information through activation of intercourse between end user, service provider and communities. By joining as a member, you will have the opportunity to participate in various events and inform your products, and you can expect various support for tests and technology exchange. Moreover, the end-user community with more than 54 members is sharing their experience and accepting it so that projects could be carried out to the right direction.

The advantages of CNCF’s membership participation include ‘technology leadership’ aspects such as reflecting opinions of direction and contributing of technology, reflecting opinions of technological development strategies that are important to the members' business, leading additional extension development, deciding direction and suggesting guidance on additional functions, etc. The membership participation also has benefits such as strengthening members’ roadmap through community participation and collaboration, cross-collaboration between enterprise and industry, and ensuring interoperability of members’ products or applications. The membership is divided into Platinum, Gold and Silver membership depending on the benefits and the size of the support, and it is proceeded with certification program, online training program and qualification examination system.

 
▲ lan Y. Choi, President of OpenStack Korea User Group

lan Y. Choi, President of OpenStack Korea User Group, introduced the main activities of the Korean user group so far through 'Community Report'. OpenStack Korea User Group was established in February 2011 and is an official user group certified to OpenStack Foundation. In addition, the Korean user group is contributing to both upstream and downstream activities across the OpenStack ecosystem. As for the upstream activities, contribution of translation in the aspect of internationalization and various contributions from “Airship” project, in which SK Telecom participated, are mentioned. Also, as for the downstream activities, various business activities such as global discussion, local meetup, study activities, community cooperation, and domestic sponsorship were introduced.

For the past one year, OpenStack Korea User Group has carried out various activities. After OpenStack Days Korea 2017 held in July 2017, the first open source software community day was held in September, and the six study group meetings were held in November and December. There was a networking day in November and a year-end party in December. In addition, 'Korea Community Day 2018' was held in February 2018, the monthly seminar in March and April, and 'MeltingCon 2018' in May with a number of communities. Moreover, the online lectures produced at the community level are also mentioned as important activities.

Meanwhile, an event celebrating OpenStack’s eighth birthday is scheduled in July. One of the most important activities of the OpenStack community, 'User Survey' will be published in the Berlin Summit in October 2018. The survey was formerly available only in English, but now contribution of the community is reflected so that it is also available as a Korean version and domestic users can easily participate.