OpenInfra Summit Sovereignty might be the word of the hour, but the OpenStack community has another – resilience.
“It’s about independence and control,” said Thierry Carrez, general manager at the OpenInfra Foundation. “It’s not a feature, it’s really a state. You’re sovereign if you have some control and some independence from others” – whether those are countries or companies.”
These “others” might be countries or companies. If an organization has a dependency, “then there is some risk.”
Carrez cited the VMware situation under Broadcom, where customers faced substantial price rises, and geopolitical uncertainties that have forced enterprises and governments to scrutinize their dependencies. Both may have given OpenStack an unexpected boost.
A large chunk of the OpenInfra Summit in Paris this month was devoted to VMware migration, with an impressive live demonstration during the keynote showed how the process could be (though nothing is ever as simple as a rehearsed demo suggests).
Open source relicensing, such as Redis’s move to a less permissive license that led to the Valkey fork, also factored into reassessments. But ultimately, “what people want is more independence from countries we used to rely on, especially in Europe,” Carrez said.
“Europe has a very strong dependency on US hyperscale providers, services… and they realize now that that dependency is potentially going to be leveraged against them, and so they want more local capacity.”
“We spent a decade telling developers to ignore infrastructure because ‘those hyperscalers are going to solve that for us,’ and now we realize that makes us very vulnerable to a lot of non-desirable outcomes.”
Following Kubernetes victory, OpenStack shifted from being a do-everything platform to concentrating on infrastructure – fortunate timing given recent events.
The summit has changed too: “It’s no longer like 10,000 people. It’s more like 1,200 people here, but it’s people that know why they’re here… They have infrastructure provider concerns.”
Compared to previous summits, there is renewed energy, driven in part by external events as well as the focus Carrez highlighted.
It has been an eventful few years for the OpenInfra Foundation. Beyond VMware’s licensing changes and geopolitical instability, OpenInfra’s executive director, Jonathan Bryce, was appointed executive director of the Linux Foundation months after OpenInfra joined it. Bryce admitted he’s leaning heavily on people like Carrez due to the increased workload.
Bryce also addressed the summit’s third major theme: AI. “What’s different is that for cloud, it was a strategic initiative from the CTO or CIO,” he said. “But for this, it’s coming from the CEO and the board.”
The classic “we need an AI” from the boss meets the “but what do you want it to do?” question.
Bryce says it’s all about inference, particularly as agentic workloads demand far more tokens than an occasional AI chats.
“One of the first things we have to get right is inference,” he said. “This is the same kind of thing that we were working on for 10 or 15 years around databases… we’ve gone through this transition before with telecom workloads,” and here we go again.
What if the AI bubble bursts? Bryce recalled the dotcom era when suddenly redundant systems were repurposed. “Right now, we need more infrastructure than we can possibly build.” And if the bubble bursts “we might have a moment of spare capacity, but that’s not going to last very long.”
Stig Telfer, CTO at StackHPC, a company specializing in OpenStack and research computing, acknowledged the uncertainty. “What if AI is so much more hyped than it actually is? What if the demand doesn’t rise to the level where all of the new cloud businesses and all of the existing cloud businesses were buying GPUs in their hundreds of thousands? What happens if suddenly there’s an immense oversupply in the market?
“Nobody knows… It may be that this is causing people to take more of a wait-and-see approach.”
On community resilience, Bryce pointed to OpenStack’s track record. “We’ve gone through this multiple times where companies employing the largest number of contributors changed strategy and moved on.
“Resilience, it’s not just a theoretical term. Our community is structured in a way where we truly are resilient, and I think we’ve proven that for 15 years” ®