 Hi, this is Josepil Parthian. Welcome to another episode here for Let's Talk. We are here at Open Source Summit in Vancouver. And today we have with us once again, Ildiko Vansha, Director of Community at Open Infra Foundation. Indigo, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me. You're here, you know, you're presenting at the Leadership Summit as well. So I would love to know a bit about your presentation and what was the whole theme of your session. The title of the session is What is Open Source Without Collaboration? And the session really is about to kind of give a call to action, how important it is to participate in open source communities and how important it is that open source communities are working with each other as well. We are still seeing a lot of examples of companies consuming open source, but they don't always participate and they don't always give back. So that is one part of what the session is trying to point at. And the other thing is that open source became so popular, it is sort of living its own hype cycle in a way, like people are using open source itself as a term for marketing. And that has an effect on the ecosystem as well. So you see new projects popping up all the time. They sometimes become single vendor projects because sometimes the motivation of putting the code out there is just to make sure that you can truly say that it's open source. But if the motivation is not to build something together with others who are trying to solve the same or a very similar challenge, then at some point the ecosystem will become so fragmented that we will all be blocked by then. I personally have a lot of experience with people telling me that I don't have time because I'm looking at this and this and this and that and that just got introduced and this just happened. And there are a lot of overlaps between those things that they mentioned. So I think that it is important to also do some education around the ideals, the principles of open source and how it's not really all about the code. It is about the collaboration that happens around the code, what is supposed to happen, all that, the communication, the learning that you can get from it. So only consuming the code, you really are missing out on a lot. You folks at Open Infra, you also deal with a lot of vendors. There's a huge community there. Can you talk about some of the initiatives that you have done to educate community members which are like consumers that hey, or you have also created some kind of venues for them so they can get involved. Yes. So what we are doing, there are a lot of layers to it. Like I myself, I'm a community manager for one of our projects. It's called Starling Acts. And part of my job is to both work with the contributors of the existing community, work with the newcomers who are trying to join and participate. They would like to understand the ecosystem, how it works, how they can get involved. And as part of my job at the Foundation, I'm also working with the ecosystem member companies and organizations to make sure that they are able to participate in the project because sometimes it is challenging in terms of I understand what open source is. I'm consuming the project that would be Starling Acts or any other open source project out there. But sometimes we hear that I understand that I should participate and I should get involved. But we have a small team or limited resources. We have customers. We have to make sure that our products and services get built and maintained and we get the customer requests. So we don't have the bandwidth to participate. So actually recently we are kind of looking more into how to address those kind of challenges and how to work closer with companies who are struggling as a form of a partnership, training and partnership so that we can in a more targeted way help them. And the communities are actually doing the same thing on the community sort of layer in terms of creating materials about how to contribute educational materials for organizations. Like the OpenStack community has a contributor guide for companies and organizations. Like what do you need to do to enable your employees to contribute to this project? What kind of tools they will need to use? What are the communication platforms? For instance, the OpenStack community is using IRC as a chat tool. You need to enable the IRC connection in your firewalls because sometimes it is blocked. So pointing out the prerequisites and not just on the tooling side but also on the time commitment side like you need to enable your employees and team members to participate in the community, to work with people who are outside of your organizations but technically also kind of colleagues of your employees and team members. And this is really important to organizations to understand all of the aspects. So both us as a foundation as well as our communities, we're all trying to make sure that we have materials and we also just openly communicate to help educate the ecosystem and anyone who is trying to join and participate. We are doing that a lot. In one month, we'll be back in Vancouver again for the OpenInfo summit. Talk a bit about are there going to be any session or which will be focused more on this topic also to help companies understand about open source and get involved? Yes, so I'm personally really excited about the Open Infrastructure Summit just in itself because our event is structured in a way that is very collaboration focused and it's encouraging collaboration. We have three pillars or three main components to the event. One is the regular conference sessions, presentations, panel discussions, which will involve community related topics as well and how the sausage gets made. And another pillar is called the forum. The forum is a set of interactive sessions which are serving the purpose of creating the feedback loop between users and developers so people can come together at the forum sessions around the particular topic, which is usually around one of the OpenInfo projects or a more community focused topic and really talk about what the struggles are, what the plans are, what the feedback is. For instance, if it's about an open stack project or about Starling X, people come together and say, oh, I'm using the platform and I really like this feature. I'm struggling with this part, something is missing that I need. How can we make sure that it makes its way into the platform? So these are really productive discussions that make sure that those who are developing the software and work on the documentation, they get guidance from the users, people who are actually using those projects on a daily basis. And we will also have a forum session that is more specifically around challenges in the open source ecosystem. I think the title of the session is so you know what open source is or do you. And the session targets to talk about a new initiative or new effort that we are just starting, which is called Community Blueprint. And the idea behind that initiative is to collect stories, experiences that people are having in the open source ecosystem and building on those stories, showing how you can improve kind of independently of which actor you are in the ecosystem, whether you're a contributor, you are a company who are trying to contribute, you're a community member in a leadership position who are trying to help the community, kind of trying to look into what the challenges are in the current open source ecosystem at large and how we can kind of not just educate people but also help them to understand both the challenges as well as how to apply the principles, the processes that they're out there. So it's kind of an educational, the end goal is to have a set of materials and written content but flipping it around a little bit because there are a lot of textbooks out there that say that this is the method. And by the way, there's an example how you might be able to use it. We are flipping this completely around and saying what is your experience? What is your story? What have you struggled with? Did you solve that challenge? Or is it something that is still not solved yet? And we will build the solution and suggestions part on the stories. So kind of making it more of a, I don't know, personalized experience or personal experience? Yeah, it's more about them versus how. And when we look at opening, the whole theme is open source. All the sessions it's all about, you launch a new project and you talk about it. And then after that, when you get out of the stage, people just come and start asking questions. So the whole theme is collaboration there. Now I want to come back to a Starling X project because as before we started interview, you said it's going to be the fifth anniversary. Is that correct? Of course, because just like in end game, the snap took five years away. Similarly, COVID took a lot of time away. So give us a quick intro about the project and then let's talk about in five years when you look back at the project that, hey, this is what we have achieved. The Starling X project itself, it is a fully integrated cloud platform. That is a really powerful tool that you can use to build infrastructure either in a large data center or in the distributed environment. And Starling X integrates well-known open source components like the Linux kernel, OpenStack Kubernetes. So we also call it as an example project to the low key stack, which is Linux OpenStack Kubernetes infrastructure. And what is really cool about this project that is that it gives you a set of standard APIs through those open source components that people already know, they are using it very actively. And it takes them to the next level because Starling X, the community, they are also working on adding components to the open source projects that they are integrating. They call that set of components the flock, flock services. And that's where the name comes from. The Starling birds are flying in a mermoration, a flock. And that was the inspiration for the name as a fun. This is what happened five years ago, example. And those flock services provide those automation management type of components like software management, infrastructure management, fault management. So everything that you need to be able to efficiently deploy and operate a large scale infrastructure. And what Starling X also does is both OpenStack and Kubernetes, they were originally designed with one large data center in mind. So when you want to expand beyond the walls of one data center, that's when things become challenging and very complex and hard to manage. What Starling X gives you is a distributed cloud architecture. So you can manage a distributed infrastructure centrally. And your sub clouds also have autonomy at the same time. If you have connection loss, not a problem at all because the sub cloud is still able to operate. And this is something that is filling a gap in the open source infrastructure space because there have been a lot of complaints before this project became alive that it's really hard to operate, sometimes hard to operate infrastructure even within the walls of one data center, let alone a massive distributed environment. And Starling X kind of gives you a next generation of infrastructure in a way where you're using components that are already available, keep being developed and providing new features and also allows you to take them outside of the data center and just really take them anywhere where you need it. And at the same time, if you have a really small footprint at a sub cloud site, Starling X can manage that as well. If you have the right hardware configuration, it can run on one single CPU core. And now give us an update in these five years and of course adoption of the use cases already there on the site, but I would love to hear five years, the milestones and adoption. So another fun thing to mention is Starling X was announced five years ago here in Vancouver, where we are having this interview today. I was here. And you were here. And it just came together in the universe like that, that we will have our own summit here in a month. And we get to talk about what happened since we were here. Some of us were here five years ago and there are new people who are just learning about the project. So how was the community's journey where they are now and where they are going? So one of the big changes since the inception of the project was fully containerizing the infrastructure. So the project, the platform is deploying infrastructure services in containers, which gives you a lot of flexibility and an easier way to manage the infrastructure services. And they also have been working a lot on the distributed cloud architecture to again making sure that you can take your infrastructure outside of the walls of one data center. The community gained new users. For instance, the platform is really popular in 5G and OpenRAN deployments, T systems, Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, and there are more examples of large telecom operators who are utilizing the platform for their 5G and OpenRAN rollouts and really using it as a core component to their backbone infrastructure. And that is really exciting to see. The project is, for instance, providing support for things like precision time protocol because time synchronization is really important for 5G. But at the same time, it is also something that is crucial for real-time systems and mission critical systems like industrial automation, for instance, or automotive, which are also use cases for the Starling X project. So it is not specialized for telecom. The project actually shows how applicable the strict, some of the strict telecom requirements are outside of that industry segment and how applicable they are elsewhere also. So it is really cool to see how the project kind of connects the industry segments together at the same time. I think, well, thank you so much for sitting with me and, of course, talk about the event, your presence here and it is a lot of love to see you again soon. Thank you. Thank you.