Recently the news broke that Microsoft has joined the Open Infrastructure Foundation as a "Platinum" member, which is an organization that helps open source communities create the tools infrastructure operators need for data center cloud computing technology, 5G, Edge, containers, CI / CD and more.
Microsoft's interests in the life of the OpenInfra community are related to the connection with the development of open projects for platforms hybrid cloud and 5G systems, as well as the integration of support for Open Infrastructure Foundation projects in the Microsoft Azure product.
The announcement was made by Jonathan Bryce, CEO of the foundation and in his announcement he shared the following:
«The OpenInfra Foundation has signed an agreement with Microsoft as a new platinum member. Through this multi-year commitment, the OpenInfra community will work closely with Microsoft to promote open infrastructure use cases, including hybrid cloud and 5G, by participating and contributing to multiple open source project communities. "
With this, Microsoft joins more than 60 member organizations of the Foundation, whose mission is to create open source communities that develop software that runs in production. Supported by more than 110.000 people in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, native container applications, edge computing, and central data clouds. Its projects include Airship, Kata Containers, OpenInfra Labs, OpenStack, StarlingX, Zuul and of the most recent, supporting the Magma 5G project.
Facebook developed Magma to help telecom operators implement mobile networks quickly and easily. The project, which Facebook made open source in 2019, achieves this by providing a core of distributed mobile packages focused on software and tools to automate network management. This containerized networking feature integrates with the background of an existing mobile network and makes it easy to launch new services at the edge of the network.
Microsoft joins an impressive group of companies as a platinum member of the new OpenInfra Foundation, which includes Ant Group, Ericsson, Facebook, FiberHome, Huawei, Red Hat, Tencent, and Wind River, all of whom bring their operational expertise from large-scale infrastructure to the community that writes software from open source for the next decade of OpenInfra, ”said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenInfra Foundation.
“Software like OpenStack, which powers 9 of the world's top 10 telecommunications networks today, Kata Containers, which secures the world's largest payment network, and Airship, which powers AT & T's 4G and 5G networks in production. today ”hui. «
"Microsoft is joining this effort to support building the next decade of open infrastructure technology because hybrid cloud is a very important part of our technology portfolio," said van Wyk. “We believe in a variety of clouds: public and private, from hyperscale to edge, each tailored to the unique workloads our customers must deliver, and we can't do it without open source. We are here at the OpenInfra Foundation to get involved in the community and work together to build and integrate open source technologies to provide carrier-grade Microsoft Azure infrastructure for carriers. «
Although Ant Group and Tencent have a cloud background, Collier noted that Microsoft is a breakthrough given that it is the first of the three big US cloud providers to join the OIF. He noted that a recent OpenStack user survey found that 40% of users deploying in a multi-cloud configuration are already using Microsoft Azure.
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