For those who have been paying attention (and SDxCentral has been), the OpenStack Foundation has been expanding its scope beyond the basic compute, storage, and networking sub-projects of its cloud infrastructure software. Today at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin the group made it official, announcing that it will host new open source projects with a new governance framework.

The OpenStack Foundation board approved the governance framework to incubate new pilot projects that are relevant to the open infrastructure community. As part of this new framework, the first four pilot projects are Kata Containers, Airship, Zuul, and StarlingX. All of these projects have been previously announced.

According to Alan Clark, chairman of the OpenStack Foundation board, “The open infrastructure strategy and new governance framework reflect the voice of our users.” He said the new pilot projects make it easier for users to put OpenStack into production and integrate with other infrastructure software.

However, at least one OpenStack user is not totally thrilled with the new direction. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, told SDxCentral today, “Anything that distracts from continuous improvement in OpenStack is slightly unfortunate. Instead of trying to be all things to all people and support every possible niche use case, focus on delivering clean infrastructure on demand. That has certainly been our focus. It’s what people really want.”

He said the new ancillary projects could slow down the adoption of OpenStack, which he considers a very important project. “I like to work with people who are singularly focused,” said Shuttleworth, who happens to be keynoting at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin this week.

Kata Containers: The OpenStack Foundation unveiled Kata Containers in December 2017. The goal of the project is to unite the security advantages of virtual machines (VMs) with the speed and manageability of containers. The project is designed to be hardware agnostic and compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification for Docker containers as well as the container runtime interface (CRI) for Kubernetes.

Airship: This project was announced in May by AT&T, SK Telecom, Intel, and the OpenStack Foundation. “Simply put, Airship lets you build a cloud easier than ever before,” said Amy Wheelus, AT&T’s vice president of cloud and Domain 2.0 Platform integration, when the project was announced. In September, Wheelus elaborated saying, “What Airship allows us to do is containerize our control plane.”

Zuul: In May, the OpenStack Foundation made Zuul, an open source continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform, into an independent project. Zuul also released version 3 of its software. Zuul was originally developed for OpenStack CI testing and has since attracted contributors and users across many different organizations, including BMW, GoDaddy, OpenLab, and Wikimedia.

StarlingX: This project was launched in October to focus on edge computing as it relates to the cloud infrastructure layer. Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said that the scope of edge computing is extremely large. “When people talk about edge, they kind of present this picture that it’s ‘a thing,’ he said. “But really, it’s an entirely new delivery model and infrastructure space as well. It’s really like the web or mobile. It’s that big in terms of the scope of it. StarlingX is really filling one of the spaces in that stack.”

As part of its expanded mission, the OpenStack Foundation is also changing the name of its twice-annual summit. Effective with the Denver Summit in the Spring of 2019, the event will be branded the “Open Infrastructure Summit.”