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Open Infrastructure Foundation adopts cross-cloud resource manager Taibai

China-based FiberHome donated code after consultation – didn't just "throw it over the wall"

The Open Infrastructure Foundation, home to OpenStack, has a new project: an open source multi-cloud management platform called Taibai.

Code for the project was donated by FiberHome – a Platinum member of the Foundation that operates in China, offering information and communication network products and associated services.

The tool allows authentication across multiple clouds, tracks resources both on-prem and in the cloud, and can manage VMs in both locations. Today the tool can work with OpenStack, AWS, and Alibaba Cloud, and has lesser capacities driving VMware clouds.

Taibai is akin to Cloudify or Terraform, but currently rather less mature than either

Open Infrastructure Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce told The Register the tool is currently strongest when "aggregating a world view across different cloud environments" and providing information on "things like usage, resource allocation, security, and logging".

"I think those are the first set of challenges you run into when you do multi-cloud,” he explained>. Taibai therefore aims to ease adoption of multiple clouds.

It consists of an abstraction layer plus plugins that talk to other clouds using their public APIs.

Bryce said Taibai was released after consultation with FiberHome about the merits of incorporating it into OpenStack or releasing it as a discrete project. The latter plan won out because it was felt Taibai has wide applicability beyond those willing to adopt OpenStack.

"They wanted to give back and were interested in feedback," Bryce said, contrasting the work to open source Taibai with what he called a "throw it over the wall" process some companies use when contributing code to the open source community.

Taibai can be found on GitHub. An OpenStack expert of The Reg's acquaintance has reviewed the Taibai repo and rated the tool as akin to Cloudify or Terraform – but currently rather less mature than either.

The tool was announced at the virtual Open Infrastructure Foundation Summit, where Bryce revealed that over 25 million cores of OpenStack compute are now in production – a 66 per cent increase in total cores since last year.

Seven companies are now running over a million OpenStack cores each – among them China Mobile, Line, Walmart Labs, Workday and Yahoo. The Foundation's most recent user survey counted over 180 OpenStack-powered public cloud datacentres.

Bryce also revealed that contributors to the Foundation's Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure project collectively made over 150,000 changes over the last year. He suggested that number indicates a thriving community, and it's hard to disagree. ®

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