StarlingX 2020 Annual Report
StarlingX is a fully integrated, open source platform that is supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. The project integrates together well-known open source projects such as Ceph, Kubernetes, the Linux kernel, OpenStack, and more to create a cloud platform that is optimized for edge and IoT use cases. During the first half of 2020 the OpenInfra Foundation Board of Directors confirmed the project as top-level Open Infrastructure project.
StarlingX 4.0 was released in August 2020. The platform is architected as a fusion between OpenStack and Kubernetes to create a robust and flexible environment for edge workloads, let them be bare metal, containerized, or virtualized. In the 4.0 release the majority of the infrastructure services are containerized to ensure easier and more flexible management and operation. The community has also continued to have increased focus on security related functionality during the release cycles in 2020.
The 4.0 release is integrating the Ussuri release of OpenStack and it was also certified as a conformant Kubernetes distribution of the v1.18 version. The platform now has support for Kata Containers, as a container runtime, with optional support for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) functionality. The contributors also integrated Active Directory for Kubernetes API authentication and Certification Manager for more automation in that area.
The community had continued focus on making it easier for users to deploy and operate the platform as well as to help new contributors to start participating in the project. As part of this effort documentation was a high priority item during the year where new contributors added a lot of new content in the area of operation and user guides.
Following the already established processes to build and maintain an open governance model the community held two elections to fully re-elect the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and one election to elect Project and Technical leads. This means that the community's whole leadership was refreshed through elections during 2020.
The community was particiapting in industry events to spread the word about the progress the conributors are making as well as to provide the opportunity for the contributors and new comers to come together and discuss project related matters, such as design, development and testing related topics. There were presentations about the project at virtual events such as the Open Infrastructure Summit, OpenDev and Edge Computing World and contributors discussed technical details about the project at the two Project Teams Gathering (PTG) events. The community organized one very successful virtual hackathon at the beginning of 2020 to increase unit test coverage throughout all the StarlingX services that are developed by the contributors of the project.
The project had 2237 changes committed by 111 authors from 7 organizations during the year.
2020 was also the year of commercial adoption. T-Systems and Verizon are now deploying StarlingX as part of their infrastructure to utilize the platform's capabilities that make it ideal to deploy it as a distributed system to power use cases in the telecom industry.
The StarlingX code is hosted on Github under the Apache 2 license. Learn about the project, how to contribute and support the community at starlingx.io. Join these channels to get involved:
The Open Infrastructure Foundation just published its 2020 annual report. Learn more about other OpenInfra projects and how you can get involved.