Mark Collier on Open Source Momentum – KubeCon Europe 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're here in London at CubeCon 2024.

This is our first interview of the morning here on, uh, Wednesday, which is actually the first day that the exhibit hall is open. Uh, Tuesday at CubeCon Week is traditionally sort of the satellite conferences where they have a lot of different conferences and each pro, not each project, but most of the projects have their own as well as areas like Platform Engineering, cloud Native Security, et cetera. So let me introduce you to our first guest here today.

His name is Mark Collier. Mark is the COO with the Open Infra Foundation. Did I get that right?

That's right. Yep. Absolutely.

Cool. Hey Mark, it's nice to have you on. Good to see you.

Thanks. Um, before we jump into anything else, let's hear a little bit about you. Sure.

How did you come to be the COO here? Give us a little bit of your journey. Yeah, so I mean, I, I just, uh, I, I love technology from the time I was like this high and, you know, always wanted to work in it and worked with a lot of interesting companies, kind of Dell super early on and, and Yahoo and others.

And then really fell in love with Open Source about 20 years ago, which a, a lifetime ago. And so about 15 years ago, I was at a company called Rackspace and started an open source project called OpenStack with NASA and others. And from that point forward, I've just, I can't get enough of open source.

And we started the OpenStack Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to this project. And then a few years ago, we expanded it into the Open Infra Foundation. So we have a bunch of of projects.

I get it now. OpenStack's kind of the, the, the origin story. It's still our biggest project, one of the biggest open source projects in the world, even 15 years later.

So I get it. You know, it's funny 'cause I know, I guess almost a year ago at least, Rackspace kinda re-committed to OpenStack and Yeah. It's an amazing Thing and going into it.

Yeah. And good for them. And I was glad to see that.

Um, so Open Infra now is sort of an umbrella foundation, right? Similar, the Linux Foundation, I guess, with several projects in there. We'll focus on OpenStack in a minute, but if you wouldn't mind share with the audience some of the other, uh, projects Yeah, Absolutely.

That are part of this. Yeah. So Kata Containers is a really interesting project.

It's a secure container, uh, system. And so one of the nice things about containers is they're really lightweight and fast, but then sometimes the security, you know, relative to like a virtual machine, kata containers kind of gives you the best of both worlds. And it allows you to have, uh, interact with it like a container, spin it up very quickly, but it has more of a, a, a stronger level of, uh, vir sort of lightweight virtualization around it.

So it came out of a Ant group and Alibaba and, uh, a lot of huge tech giants in China. It's used now in Microsoft, and you can run it on AWS and many other places. But the largest payment processor in the world, Ali, BA or Alipay, is fully, uh, secure because of kta container.

So that, that's one example. Starling X is another one of our open source projects. Great.

It's used for edge computing and a lot of different, um, industrial IOT. Some of the largest 5G networks in the world are powered by Starling X and it actually brings together OpenStack and Kubernetes kind of, uh, behind the scenes. Um, and we also have A-C-I-C-D project called zuel for continuous, you know, testing.

And that's, how do you spell that? ZUUL. Okay.

Very cool. Questions. Uhhuh.

So yeah, that, those are some of our projects and Yeah, absolutely. It's been great to see the expansion. Um, and a lot of them are, uh, you know, they kind of saw what we did with OpenStack and said, well, what I like the community approach, the four opens we call it, is our sort of philosophy for how to build great software that the whole world can be a part of.

And so we're using that method, but for, you know, these sort of things that are adjacent to OpenStack and all of them really work well together. Love it. Um, I wanted, obviously we're here at Q Con cloud native con part of Linux Foundation, without getting personal, but interaction between LF and the Open Infra foundation.

How, how, how does that work? Oh, it's works very well. And in fact, uh, one of the, the things that, uh, we've just announced is that we are, uh, intending to become part of the Lennox Foundation.

So the Open Infra Foundation will actually be in the future, one of the, uh, top level foundations, if you will. Like the similar foundation. Yeah.

Right. Similar to PyTorch Foundation, open, SSF. So we're actually joining forces.

We've been working hand in hand, uh, in sort of in the market. If you look at the biggest users in the world, they run Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes together. We have a thing called the Open in for Blueprint, where you can learn about how to run 'em together.

So the market of sort of users have always combined these technologies. Now we're actually joining forces at the foundation level kind of reflect how that's, that's happening. So the, the Linux Foundation Board unanimously approved this, uh, partnership, this joining together, the Open Infra Foundation board, unanimous unanimously approved it recently.

So that's actually one of the things that we're excited to talk about, is we're we've been sort of informally working together as open source people do, and now we're sort of formalizing that. And that's one of the reasons we're here today. And, uh, talking with so many people because of the way that people run Lennox, OpenStack and Kubernetes together, and now the foundations will kind of reflect what the market's been telling us for quite some time is, Hey, let's work together more, maybe more formally, not just informally.

I love it. That's great, man. No, I realized I have my, uh, thing on here.

I have to take this off. But anyway, um, Mark, You heard it here first, by the way. When, when will this actually take effect, you think?

Yeah, it's a great question. Um, there are a few steps left in the process. So, you know, right now, we, uh, did talk about, you know, started to talk publicly about how the boards have, uh, you know, approved it.

So it's gonna take probably a few weeks to really kind of, you know, implement. It's, this is, these things don't, don't happen instantaneously, but, you know, we're on the road to, to putting that in, in place. And in the meantime, of course, it's open source.

So we've, we've been working side by side for over a decade. We, we will continue to do that, but in terms of actually putting the organizations together and, and, and, uh, you know, putting that together in terms of like the fine print, whatever, uh, that, that's probably a few weeks out. Right.

Great. Um, that's big news, man. It's, It's big news.

It is big news. And, and people have been super excited about it. And we're I am, I am too excited to, I wanna bring up another thing with you and then we could jump into any other news you have.

I, I see it because of where I sit in the world talking to so many people. We're at an interesting point, confluence point, if you will, in the market for several reasons, right? First of all, you have changes in VMware licensing and usage.

Love that topic. Well, but at the same time, people are using that as a, a jumping off point to say, well, you know, we, we've always been in the data center, but we've always said, maybe we wanna move more to the hyperscalers, you know, to the public cloud. We want to do more multi-cloud, we wanna do more hybrid cloud.

Maybe this is a good time to look at options mm-hmm. Just because of, of licensing changes. And then the third point, which is, you know what, while we're looking at all that, maybe we should look at modernizing our applications and moving, you know, to a cloud native stack as well, a cloud native architecture, microservices, all the above.

We haven't seen these, you know, sometimes the currents just line up, right? Right. Yes, yes.

But they've come together, right, right, right now, yeah. That's gotta be a huge opportunity for the open infra as well as not a burden, but, you know, the, the, the pressures aren't to offer a real solution here, right. A real alternative.

Give them options. You're absolutely right. I mean, it's, I've never seen anything like this in my career.

I mean, there's always gonna be the pendulum swing back and forth and, you know, new, uh, new trends come and go. But, uh, or come back again. But I think that you're right, it's the confluence of factors.

So what, what, what I we're seeing right now is, there's a couple of big things that are happening. One is, of course the relicensing or the, the price increase. All the VMware stuff is in, in a sense been kind of an incredible gift to open source because in OpenStack in particular, we're seeing insane demand for OpenStack.

Right now, it's, the project turns 15 years old this year, and it's, we've, what we just, uh, this week are doing our 31st release called Epoxy 31 on Time releases. So OpenStack keeps getting better, but what's really cool is the demand for it has just been off the charts. We have 80% of the members of our foundation have had companies come to them and say, please help me migrate off VMware onto OpenStack.

So we we're seeing just like this, and is, you could call it a burden, that opportunity. It's, it's a lot. I mean the, it's like a fire hose of, of interest all sudden.

And then we also see digital sovereignty is another big driver. Yeah, that's true. Particularly here in Europe.

And so, uh, and I guess the last one is, is no secret is ai, right? So what all of these things are pointing to is people are building $2 trillion of net new infrastructure. And it's, by the way, not all going into hyperscalers.

A lot of this is like GPU dedicated clouds, you know, four Weave just had a, an IPO. I'm, I'm not here to give financial advice, but you see this happening, right? So people are building new data centers and all that new hardware needs software, it needs infrastructure software.

And so that, that means they're using OpenStack. And a lot of these use cases with Linux and Kubernetes and this kind of open for blueprint that we've been, we've been talking about, it's not just pick one or the other. You run 'em all together.

But we see this as just a big opportunity. And yes, people are looking at, okay, let's rethink our decisions. Do we want to be, you know, in our data center or in another data center?

Do we wanna and lock in? People are like, yeah, I don't wanna be locked in. Locked in is a thing that people worry about it for a while, then they kind of get complacent.

It's like, eh, I don't know. Lock in. I really care.

I'm, you know, my VMware's working great. And then all of a sudden they can, they're whoa. Now I know why I should have cared about, about lock in.

So there's this a reawakening of like, wow, I, I'm about to make a decision I might have to live with for another decade. Let's make sure I'm going open source. Let's make sure I have control of my destiny.

Let's make sure, even if it's open source, it's multi-vendor. Because if you have single vendor open source, that's kind of like another lock in path. So open stack, Kubernetes, Linux, these are great examples of open source project that are huge ecosystem, lots of options.

If you pick OpenStack, you don't have to necessarily stick with whatever vendor that is. There's 10 other ones that'll be happy to help you. So I think it's a great time for infrastructure.

It's kind of having another moment. People take it for granted in certain cycles. It's still there, but it's not really exciting.

Or people lose interest. They're, they're talking about it now. They're talking about trillions for new data centers, nuclear power to power this stuff, ai.

So as an infrastructure and an open source guy at Open Infra Foundation, it's a really great time for us. So we're, we're just gonna try to take advantage of it. Absolutely.

Alright. We haven't spoken about enough things yet. Let's throw some more on the pot.

What else? I mean, beyond this big news about joining with lf, what's other news here that you guys are talking about at the, uh, show today? Yeah, I mean, I think, um, you know, as I've mentioned, we, every six months we have a new release of OpenStack.

And, and again, it's always, uh, getting better and tighter integration with Kubernetes, which is relevant to, uh, the crowd here. You know, one of the interesting things in this epoxy release, it's actually coming out on Thursday tomorrow, but, um, you know, it's all open, so we can talk, talk about it. 'cause we openly develop it, but we have some better support at the bare metal level for using container images to kind of rapidly provision new hosts.

So the ways in which, like containers and and OpenStack overlap has been happening for a decade. But I think every, every release we, we see it happening more. So that's one thing.

I think just again, also looking at, uh, the growth of OpenStack users, for example, Walmart. So they have over a million cores of compute that they just, uh, disclosed publicly at, at, at another recent event. You know, you see Bloomberg has a huge OpenStack cloud.

Um, another example actually of the digital sovereignty, um, case is in France, the top 10 largest banks in France all run OpenStack. Why? Because they need to know where the data's stored, who has access to it, what laws apply to it.

So that's just a, you know, a a few examples of where we see OpenStack being used for digital sovereignty, for control, for lack of lock in and, and at just insane scale for like real, real businesses. Absolutely. You know, I think you're gonna see more digital sovereignty, not just in the eu, but unfortunately with everything that's going on in the us, every country in this world is going to have digital sovereignty, sovereignty policies.

Absolutely. Right. Because as they look to shorten supply chains and, you know, there's supposed to be new tariffs and trade wars and all this other craziness.

Wow. Um, people are going to look inward and, and protect their own. I don't know if you know, I I'm not happy about it.

I know. I Think that's the world we live in. Yeah.

Um, wanted to also mention though, you know, I I, I actually remember, like I'm sure you do 'cause you were there when OpenStack first burst on the scene. Right. And you know, back then the idea of, you know, this whole public cloud, private cloud, that was the whole thing.

Right? Right, Right. And there were several cloud platforms that in retrospect, or a hypervisor plus, let's say.

Mm-hmm. But digital, uh, OpenStack has stayed the course has outlasted a lot of the other ones. You know, they're names that are condemned to history, if you will.

Right. But OpenStack and, and as I, we were talking about before, about a year ago, I mean, it kind of revitalized the open infra foundation. Absolutely.

And, um, it's a great story, man. Congratulations with Thank you. Thank you.

You've seen it through too, the whole time. Yeah. I mean it's, it's, I I think it's, like I said, uh, the interest in, in infrastructure kind of comes and goes as to whether it's like hypey at the time, but the actual infrastructure never goes away.

Like, no, you know what, well, the thing about cloud native is the way I always looked at cloud native is cloud native is we're, you know, uh, sort of a generation lucky enough to be born into a time when they can just take for granted the cloud is that someone else is handling that. Well, guess what? It's still, people are handling that.

You know, and it's, it's a great thing that if OpenStack these schools but still be handling it still needs handling. Right. It's not like, Just because you are not Can forget about it.

We can't all forget about it. And it doesn't just go away. It never goes away.

And, and what's interesting too is if you look at the application layer where the things happening that are maybe sexier, like ai, whatever, that always has to be, uh, Lead that foundation, You have to keep improving and changing the infrastructure layer. We have to have GPUs supported. Actually, our new opens stack release has supports new new forms of GPU pass through and live migration.

So like, the job is never done at the infrastructure layer. 'cause you need the latest Nvidia, the latest a MD you know, F PGA is all this stuff, but it Hasn't been this sexy in a long term. I know.

I, Hey, it's nice. I'm Happy to see it's sack again, Baby. We're outta here.

This is CubeCon Open Infra Foundation, soon to be part of Linux Foundation. Another, what do they call it? Top, not a top level domain, but top level foundation of the, uh, Linux Foundation.

Exciting news, check out all that's going on in OpenStax. The new release is called Epoxy. Epoxy.

Yes. Think Epoxy. Check that out.

We're here all day doing interviews. You could watch them one after the next or one at a time with this Allen Shimmel at Q Con. We'll be right back.