StarlingX in 2019: How the community delivered two releases serving edge computing and industrial IoT use cases
StarlingX is a pilot project supported by the OpenStack Foundation that was announced May 2018. The project integrates well-known open source project including OpenStack, Ceph, Kubernetes, and more to create a cloud platform that is fine tuned for edge and IoT use cases.
During 2019 the community was working on creating a fusion between OpenStack and Kubernetes services to provide infrastructure software that creates a flexible environment to support virtual, containerized, or bare metal workloads.
The StarlingX community put out two major releases of the software during the year: StarlingX 2.0 (latest version is 2.0.1) and StarlingX 3.0. The 2.0 release introduced fundamental changes to the architecture including containerizing OpenStack and other services to provide more flexibility, robustness, and increased manageability. Besides architectural changes community members were also focusing on features to improve security and performance including to start work on creating a performance testing framework to ensure maintaining high standards on an ongoing basis. The 3.0 release add a crucial component called Distributed Cloud architecture to provide synchronization across edge sites. The feature is in line with the Distributed Control Plane scenario of the OSF Edge Computing Group’sReference Architecture models.
The latest release is also integrating the Train version of OpenStack. This was an important step as with this step StarlingX doesn’t carry more enhancements to the project as extra patches and the team members are actively working with the OpenStack community on further improvements and new functionality upstream.
The community has reached another milestone by having a fully elected leadership. The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) had two elections replacing half of the group each time while Project Leads and Technical Leads got elected during the second half of the year. Elections will be held on a regular basis going forward.
Further high priority items included community building and outreach. It is very important for the project to lower the boundaries of entry and make sure that it is easy for newcomers to find entry points. The community has been actively working on improving documentation and creating materials to guide new contributors. The project held a Contributor Meetup in the USA andfurther meetupsand meetup for release 2.0 and hackathons in China last year and community members also took advantage of the Project Team Gatherings as well as the Open Infrastructure Summits and Forums to have face to face discussions as well as to onboard newcomers. Some of the team members put together ahands-on workshopwhich guides participants through installing StarlingX and trying out some of the features it provides. Community members ran the training at various OSF and industry events throughout the year. The infrastructure is running on hardware donated by Packet.com.
The project had 3359 changes committed by 147 authors from more than 10 organizations during the year.
The 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 OpenStack Foundation (OSF) just published its 2019 annual report. Learn more about other OSF projects and how you can get involved.