Continually supported by one of the most active open source project communities, 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 OpenInfra Foundation published its 2024 Annual Report where you can learn about more OpenStack community highlights as well as progress made by other OpenInfra projects and working groups.