The Open Infrastructure Foundation

Julia Kreger, Mark Collier, and Mohammed Naser are all part of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), a nonprofit that builds communities around IaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The OIF is vast and global — it spans 100,000 members across over 180 countries, and it focuses on projects in multiple areas, including:

• Edge computing



• Container Infrastructure



• Public/Private hybrid cloud



• AI and Machine Learning



• CI/CD

The OIF origin story

The Foundation traces its roots to another open source project, OpenStack, which provides software for creating private and public clouds. Julia describes OpenStack. “OpenStack is a whole slew of projects that we've had to build, orchestrate, and integrate, which allow you to use software to manage your infrastructure.” These projects include Airship, Kata Containers, and Zuul, an open source CI/CD platform for gating changes across multiple systems.

OpenStack accelerated and began to build a larger community. “Since its inception, over 8,500 developers have contributed to OpenStack.” says Mark. The team wanted to take their work with OpenStack even further. Mark explains the journey from OpenStack to OIF. “We wanted to apply the things we learned with OpenStack to make an even bigger impact, so we became the Open Infrastructure Foundation.”

The Four Opens

The OIF follows a set of guiding principles dubbed “The Four Opens.” Mohammed explains them in the quotes below.

• Open source: “All the software we build is 100% open source — no paywalls and all with open source licenses.”



• Open design: “You have to have a public conversation about what you intend to do, you have to get that documented as a spec, that the community needs to all agree on together to make sure that it works for everybody. The community controls the roadmap of each project.” 



• Open development: “All code commits and code review are done in public, nothing is behind any walls, nothing that you have to be invited to do.”



• Open community: “Any and all discussions are locked and made public. There’s no discussion you can’t be a part of.”

Learn more about the Open Infrastructure Foundation or try one of their projects.

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