The OpenStack Foundation, which is hosting a summit in Sydney, Australia, this week, said it plans to integrate more fully with other open source projects. This includes collaborating across communities, documenting cross-project use cases, and conducting end-to-end tests.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said one of the biggest challenges facing OpenStack users is to integrate their OpenStack clouds with other open source software. “We’re focusing the direct efforts of the Foundation to address that,” said Bryce. “Things like when we do testing, we’re testing all open infrastructure components that users are likely to run.”

As part of that commitment, OpenStack today launched a new initiative — OpenLab. “Users are combining and running code from different places,” said Bryce. “We’re launching OpenLab led by Huawei, Intel, Vexxhost, and Open Telekom Cloud, which is DT’s public cloud in Europe. We’re hosting it. There will be some code. But it’s primarily going to be a testing environment.”

The goal is to test and improve support for the most popular Software Development Kits (SDKs) and open source code on OpenStack. Huawei and Intel are both committing full-time contributor resources and infrastructure to the project at its launch. Open Telekom Cloud and Vexxhost are providing OpenStack-powered public cloud infrastructure for testing.

One example of OpenStack integration includes working with open source container software. As part of OpenStack’s 10th User Survey Report, which was released today, the foundation asked respondents what kind of container platforms they were running on their OpenStack clouds. Kubernetes continues to be the most popular tool used by 50 percent of deployments using a Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) or Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) tool.

OpenStack’s 10th User Survey Report is based on 1,052 surveys and nearly 600 deployments that were recorded from June 1 through August 21, 2017.

“OpenStack has had container support since very early on,” said Bryce. “But it was focused on direct Docker containers. That’s not how most people are using containers now. They’re using Mesos, or Docker Swarm, or Kubernetes.”

The OpenStack Foundation first started working with Kubernetes about a year ago. Since then, a number of projects have sprung up to integrate different Kubernetes components into OpenStack components.

“Our biggest problem is not making OpenStack better,” said Mark Collier, the chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation. “It’s really about the integration with other pieces to get the most out of the OpenStack cloud.”

With its new focus on integrating with other open source projects, OpenStack plans to bridge the gaps between projects. “Users have written code in-house to make Kubernetes and OpenStack work well together,” said Collier. “It’s a sign we haven’t fully served their needs. They’ve had to write glue code to make it all work together.”

In addition to testing and use case development, the OpenStack Foundation expects to manage new open infrastructure projects as part of its integration strategy. It’s identified “problem domains” such as data center cloud infrastructure, edge infrastructure, container infrastructure, and CI/CD. As the community organizes around these domains, new projects may be managed independently with their own technical governance and branding. The OpenStack Foundation expects to announce new projects to deliver on this strategy in the coming months.

“This is a big part of what you’ll see from us in 2018,” said Collier. “The last mile of open source: That’s what we’re gearing up for.”

Also of note in the 10th User Survey Report were the top vendor distributions of OpenStack. In the previous user survey in April 2017, the top vendors were Red Hat and Canonical. But for the November 2017 survey, Huawei shot to the top position. And China-based EasyStack significantly increased its representation. The support for Chinese translation may have bolstered both Huawei and EasyStack.