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StarlingX Confirmed as Top-Level OSF Project

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StarlingX leverages open source projects such as Ceph, Linux, KVM, OpenStack and Kubernetes to provide a scalable, reliable edge and IoT cloud platform for demanding networks


AUSTIN, Texas — June 11, 2020 — The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) board of directors announced today that open source project StarlingX has been confirmed as a top-level open infrastructure project supported by the OSF.
 
StarlingX provides a deployment-ready, scalable and highly reliable edge infrastructure software platform to build mission critical edge clouds. Tested and released as a complete stack, StarlingX leverages components of other open source projects such as Ceph, Linux, KVM, OpenStack and Kubernetes, complementing them with new services such as configuration and fault management. The StarlingX community has optimized the solution for security, ultra-low latency, extremely high service uptime, and streamlined operation of edge and IoT use cases.

Applications for StarlingX include the far edge or last mile and such use cases as on-premise clouds in factories, Industrial IoT, autonomous vehicles and other transportation-based IoT applications, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and virtualized Radio Access Networks (vRAN), 5G, smart buildings and cities, augmented and virtual reality, high-definition media content delivery, surveillance, healthcare imaging, and universal customer premise equipment (uCPE). Electronic Commerce and Electronic Payment National Engineering Laboratory of China UnionPay has researched a secured edge infrastructure, powered by StarlingX, for a contactless payment use case at the edge. 

Confirmation by the OSF conveys recognition of a project’s success in meeting the goals of the pilot process and a commitment from the OSF to continue supporting the project. When evaluating a pilot project for confirmation, the OSF Board of Directors considers, among other factors, whether the project can demonstrate the following: 

  • a strategic focus aligned with that of the OSF and its open infrastructure mission
  • well-defined governance procedures
  • a commitment to technical best practices and open collaboration, especially as conveyed by the principles of the Four Opens 
  • an actively engaged ecosystem of developers and users that demonstrates a growing, healthy and diverse community.

“The StarlingX community has made great progress in the last two years, not only in building great open source software but also in building a productive and diverse community of contributors,” said Ildiko Vancsa, ecosystem technical lead, OpenStack Foundation. “The core platform for low latency and high performance applications has been enhanced with a container-based, distributed cloud architecture, secure booting, TPM device enablement, certificate management and container isolation. StarlingX 4.0, slated for release later this year, will feature enhancements such as support for Kata Containers as a container runtime, integration of the Ussuri version of OpenStack, and containerization of the remaining platform services.”

StarlingX became an OSF pilot project in May 2018, and since then: 

  • The initial code base was contributed by Intel and Wind River System. Since then, the project has garnered 7,108 commits from 211 authors, including developers representing 99Cloud, FiberHome, Intel, the OpenStack Foundation, China UnionPay and Wind River, among others. 
  • China UnionPay, China Unicom, and T-Systems have become early adopters of the software.
  • The StarlingX community has delivered three software releases and is actively collaborating with several other groups such as the OSF Edge Computing Group, ONAP, Akraino and more.
  • The community is actively working towards the 4.0 release of StarlingX in Q3 2020. Learn how to get involved by visiting https://www.starlingx.io/community/.

The blog includes a more complete description of the community’s achievements during the past two years.


Quotes from Organizations Contributing to StarlingX

“The confirmation of StarlingX is a critical step for the whole community towards the maturity of edge cloud infrastructure. By using StarlingX, we can build an edge cloud infrastructure platform to deliver low latency and high performance applications. 99Cloud will continuously contribute to the StarlingX and work with the community for continued success.”  —Shuquan Huang, technical director, 99Cloud Inc.

“This is a very proud moment for all of the contributors to the StarlingX project since its inception two years ago. Confirmation is a critical milestone in the growth of an open source project and reflects the hard work of all contributors as well as the increased adoption of StarlingX for key use cases such as 5G vRAN, MEC, and Industrial IoT. We look forward to continuing our contributions and advancing cloud native innovations across the community." —Gareth Noyes, senior vice president, Products, Wind River

Coming Soon: OpenDev Event Series
The OSF is hosting a virtual OpenDev event series to facilitate discussion among the open infrastructure community about how to address current challenges in cloud infrastructure. The three-part series kicks off on June 29 with the following agenda: 

  • Large-scale Usage of Open Infrastructure Software — June 29 - July 1
  • Hardware Automation — July 20 - 22
  • Containers in Production — August 10 - 12

Registration for the OpenDev virtual event series is now open! Participants can gather more information, and sign up at openstack.org/events/opendev-2020/

Project Resources

About the OpenStack® Foundation 
The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) supports the development and adoption of open infrastructure globally, across a community of over 100,000 individuals in 187 countries, by hosting open source projects and communities of practice, including datacenter cloud, edge computing, NFV, CI/CD and container infrastructure.
 
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U.S. Media Contacts:
Robert Cathey
Cathey Communications for the OpenStack Foundation
e [email protected]

Allison Price
OpenStack Foundation
e [email protected]