 Hi, this is Yo Saptin Bharti and welcome to another episode of TFR Let's Talk and today we have with us Allison Price, VP of Marketing and Community at Open Infra Foundation. Allison is great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me. I missed the show. I've been covering Open Infra when it was open the Stack Monday Summit and I mean I remember the Austin, I mean it was massive back in those days. So I do miss the community and you folks also throw very good parties. So it's and discussions are awesome. There are like so many friends, so many folks that you know I was looking forward to talking but I missed it. So I'm happy that you are here. So you can help me kind of recap what happened at Diamond. So let's start with how was the event this year? The event was great. It was our third time back in Vancouver but we still had a really crowded show. Over 50% of people were actually brand new. So it was a mixture of people who were seeing old faces from they haven't seen in a long time but otherwise people who are just getting started in the community who wanted to start collaborating with Open Infra. So the energy was really high. The expo always felt really packed and it just every time I passed by a room you could see there were meaningful discussions happening around open infrastructure projects but also just open source in general and some of the opportunities and the threats around it that the global community is facing today. Which brings me to the next point is that yeah talk about some of the you know either the discussions or the team which you picked you know hey these are the things that you know people are talking about or this is you can summarize. Hey this was the theme of the show. So I would say the theme of the show is just how ubiquitous open source has become and how open infrastructure is really there. You know from a use case perspective one of the things that you can't go to a tech conference without hearing about is AI. I mean everyone's talking about AI from proprietary software into open source and what I really loved was that we talked about it from a practical standpoint in terms of how is open source technology being used to deploy AI workloads. So in the key notes we had more demos. I mean this is my 15th summit. It was more demos than I've ever seen on stage. So we had a CODIC containers demo where they put an AI workload within a confidential container. We had NVIDIA talking about how they use open stack Swift for object storage for AI workloads. And we also had Graphcore AI do a demo around how they're using open stack and Terraform and other open source technologies to really power AI. And so it was really cool for me. I mean I personally am a little terrified of AI because of how you know some of the opportunities that there are there. But it's exciting to see what role the global open infra community can have in shaping what AI looks like and having our technologies at the core of that. And I think that that's really the theme is that all of these use cases that are really prominent right now between AI, confidential computing. There's open infrastructure projects at the very core of it making them production ready. How you have seen the adoption evolution of open stack or open infra technology because the fact is that in early days all technologies are shiny. People love to talk about them. But then technologies they matured like nobody talks about Linux kernel anymore. But that is the backbone of modern technology. Mainframe is backbone of modern economy not technology. Same is the case I think open stack or open infra. So talk about some of those adoption use cases. When people say that open stack is a telco story, it is. But it's also a story for so many other industries. One of my most favorite stories. So I talk a lot with different open stack users and I was telling one of our engineers from Walmart. I was like, people keep telling me that open stack is dead. And he literally laughed in my face. He was like, we're deploying over a million cores in production and we want to get more involved. And so I think from both, like from industries across. So we have, you know, Walmart from a retail perspective, Bloomberg from a finance perspective, who is very involved in the community. I think that we're seeing increased usage. But like you said, like, infrastructure, it can be boring and it should be like open stacks become something that it's at the maturity level where the bugs aren't the bugs are not overcoming the features. So it's there's not as much to talk about, but it's still being very widely used. I run the open stack user survey. And as of last year, we have over 40 million cores in production, which is an incredible increase from previous years when we started with of course zero, but then it steadily went up to 10, then 15 and 25. And then it jumped to 40 million cores. And it's not just those large users like Bloomberg and Walmart. We also have users of all sizes that from the tens of thousands of cores to the hundreds of thousands of cores that are relying on open stack for retail, research, finance, gaming, you name an industry and open stacks powering workloads within it. Since you talked about users and I do remember one of the kind of key highlights of the show used to be and I still is a super user award. Talk a bit since you mentioned users, first of all, just talk a bit about what is the what is the importance of this award for the community? What does it recognize? And of course, who were the winners this year? Super user awards is probably my favorite part of the summit because you have the users who are incorporating the software into their workloads, which is a very valuable part of the community. But then you have the super users who take it one step further. These are organizations that, yes, they're using the software within their organization. But then they're also contributing back to the community, whether it's from an upstream perspective and they're contributing code, or they're telling their story very actively or sharing reference architectures. So it's taking that one piece from a user perspective and going an extra step. And I was really excited, so Wang Xu from Ant Group joined me on stage in the keynotes and we announced that Bloomberg was our winner for this year. We've seen increased commitment from them across all of open infrastructure. They're a gold member of the Open Infra Foundation. But they're also one of the organizations that spearheads operator conversations within the OpenStack community, making sure that people are sharing their war stories. They're sharing their challenges and how they're overcome. And it's just really exciting to be able to recognize their involvement, but also their innovation with OpenStack and lots and lots of other open source technologies. I also see a sign behind you, all women, and if I'm not wrong, for you folks, inclusion, diversity, equity, this is really a very important thing. So talk about when we look at events like OpenFra Summit, how you may create an environment so it doesn't matter because when we look at Open Infra community, OpenStack community, it's a global community, folks from all over the world. So how do you create an environment so everybody not only feel welcomes, but you also kind of bring people on stage more so that once again they feel included. Absolutely, and this is very important, like you said, like our community is in 187 countries and we have a lot of diversity among all of those individuals. So having a diverse and inclusive event is of utmost importance to us. So for the OpenFra Summit, we actually partnered with Chaos to review all of our diversity and inclusion practices for the summit to see what we could improve. So last year at the Berlin Summit, we had a silver badge and we were actually upgraded to a gold badge because we added more things to make it feel as inclusive as possible, which goes into like having pronoun stickers so that people know how to reference someone that they may be speaking with or speaking about. We have wristbands so people feel comfort from a distance level in terms of different COVID practices. But one of the other things that I'm really proud that the Open Infra Foundation prioritizes is our travel support program because especially in countries where traveling internationally is not something as accessible because of high travel costs or just barriers to entry, we have this program to help fund their travel to the event so that they can be part of the community. And we additionally work very, very closely with our Open Infra Foundation Diversity and Inclusion Working Group who helps us lower the barriers to entry for people from those countries, people from different backgrounds and make people feel as welcome as possible because that's what we as Open Infra want everyone to feel. So now we talked about, of course, the super user. We talked about diversity as well. Let's talk about what's in any major announcement, any new members that you folks announced at the event. Yeah, so we had two pretty big announcements. We just launched two regional hubs. Something that we've really noticed as time has come on is that we as a global community work really well together in building software. But when it comes to the adoption and commercialization of that software, a lot of the challenges are on a more regional level. So we opened Open Infra Europe and Open Infra Asia to create two regional hubs that can more focus on some of those issues that are regionalized versus global. So, for example, within Europe, GDPR and data sovereignty are huge issues that are really impactful, but they aren't necessarily at the same stage in other countries. So this hub gives them an opportunity to really have a forum to discuss those challenges, work on solutions, and then funnel them back up because one of the big things that we want to get across is that these are not new foundations. They are still under the Open Infra Foundation and they're still very much part of the global community. So they're still going to be something that funnels back up so that we can share these regional experiences back on a global level because different issues will happen in other regions, but just at different stages. So I think it's very important to maintain that global collaboration, even when some of the discussions are held on a more regional level. We also announced a new Gold member out of Korea called Okastro. So they have an open-stack product and one of the things that I'm really excited about here is that they are very interested in contributing back up stream to the open-stack project. So we're working with them on different training resources to get them contributing upstream, but I'm excited to welcome them to the community. We're going to be seeing them in the next couple of weeks at some of the Open Infra days that are happening in Asia, but really excited to see them commit to the Open Infra Foundation and global community as a Gold member. Are these more or less like sister bodies for Open Infra in these regions because sometimes some projects governments get involved. A lot of time governments also if you want to tap into the government funds, they will put funds towards the European or Asian or whatever it is. So talk about the more like practical reasons because technology is an easy solution, why would they have created? Yes, so they were created for some of those different nationalistic opportunities, I would say, from a different regional perspective. So whether it's through funding or through people who are more able to participate on a because of cost or the barriers to entry, basically. Like we're trying to lower those as much as possible. And it comes to that some of those relatable conversations. These regional hubs seem like a great next step to have those happen. And yes, there are funding opportunities where there's grants that are available for European based organizations or Asian based organizations, and we're hoping to take advantage of those opportunities as well to help maintain the presence of open infrastructure and open stack and other open infrastructure projects within those regions as well. Does it also mean that there will be like, of course, European centric and Asia centric, the same skill events also? We were asked that a lot in the last couple of weeks. That does not quite mean that we're still trying to figure out our event strategy and work with the founders of these two hubs on what actually makes sense. Because right now a lot of the open and for days capture a lot of those audiences, and we don't want to disrupt what already works. So we want to go to be on the ground in those communities, see how we can tailor our events to best achieve their goals and make sure that they're part of that conversation. So I think that you'll be hearing more from me about our event strategy in the next couple of months, but we're still trying to figure out with those organizers with those founding organizations, what works best for them and what makes most sense for that region. And listen, thank you so much for taking time out today. And of course, give us a recap of the event. Of course, it's more for me as well. I was not there, so I'm so happy that you kind of brought me back to the event there. Thanks for all those, of course, information that you shared also, how the community is growing. And no, open stack, mainframe, Linux, these are not a technology that I've died. It's just that they are not the new shiny objects. But they are the backbone of modern economy. So thanks for actually making that clear once again. Sometimes we have to keep repeating the message again and again, but I really love talking to you. And I would like, as you said, you will be building the events strategy. So I will look forward to talk to you again soon. Thank you. Of course, thank you so much for having me.