Despite the circumstances, 2021 has been a great year for OpenNebula! 🤓 This has been made possible thanks to the commitment of our Community, the support of our Corporate Users, and the amazing job that every single member of the OpenNebula Team has done throughout the year. In 2021, thanks to the innovative features that we’ve developed as part of the EU-funded project ONEedge, we’ve consolidated the transition that we started back in late 2019: expanding OpenNebula to the Edge! 🚀

We are sure 2022 will be awesome, and hopefully we’ll be able to resume very soon our tradition of organizing in-person community events. We’ve missed them very much! But in the meantime, and given the fact that we are now officially an all-remote company, we’ll keep organizing great on-line events like the upcoming OpenNebula Conference 2022 (May 31 – June 2, 2022). But now, it’s time to review what we’ve achieved together in 2021! 🎉

Technology

🎆 In 2021 we’ve keep improving our beloved OpenNebula 5.12 “Firework”, our first-ever LTS version: 

• In February we published EE Maintenance Release 5.12.8.
• In April we published EE Maintenance Release 5.12.9 and also the end-of-life CE Patch Release 5.12.0.4, which came with the open source migrators to version 5.12.
• In June we published EE LTS Maintenance Release 5.12.10, which incorporated something our customers were asking for: support for VMware vSphere 7!
• A couple of weeks ago we published EE LTS Maintenance Release 5.12.11, a small Xmas present for our corporate users.

🖖 In early April 2021 we launched a new major release, finally incorporating FireEdge, our new provisioning tool: the amazing OpenNebula 6.0 “Mutara”—named after the Star Trek’s Mutara Nebula

• We used this opportunity to improve the structure and update the contents of our Technical Documentation, which now includes a number of Quick Start guides for running containers, VMs, and Kubernetes clusters.
• In late April we published EE Maintenance Release 6.0.1 and CE Patch Release 6.0.0.1
• In late May we published EE Maintenance Release 6.0.2 and CE Patch Release 6.0.0.2, which included several new Multi-Cloud drivers available through our Provider Catalog.
• In July we published EE Maintenance Release 6.0.3.
• In early December we published the end-of-life CE Patch Release 6.0.0.3, which came with the open source migrators to version 6.0.

🌌 But that’s not all! Following our policy of producing a new minor version every 6 months, in early November we launched our latest release: OpenNebula 6.2 “Red Square”, which comes, among other things, with a beta version of the new Sunstone GUI!

📺 We’ve produced a number of Screencasts to showcase some of the main new features and use cases you can set up with OpenNebula, including these:

• Deploy your OpenNebula Cloud in vSphere in 5 minutes
• Exploring your new OpenNebula Cloud on VMware
• Deploying Kubernetes Clusters with OpenNebula
• Deploying K3s Clusters at the Edge
• Expanding Your OpenNebula Multi-Cloud with Google Cloud
• Preventing Vendor Lock-in with an OpenNebula Multi-Cloud
• Multi-Cloud Portability: Migrating Workloads between Google and AWS

📝 Our team has also been quite busy creating new Knowledge Base articles for our corporate users:

• Planning Your Transition from LXD to LXC (Public)
• Creating a Private Marketplace
• How to Reimport a vCenter VM
• How to Undo a Federation with HA
• How to Use OneGate to Retrieve VM Information
• Deploying Kubernetes Appliance with load balancer
• Using hooks to get real time host monitoring information
• How to test new OpenNebula EE releases using miniONE

📔 And we’ve also been publishing in-depth Blog Posts and Reports about key aspects and main trends in 2021:

• Using OpenNebula as a Cloud Service Provider
• OpenNebula versus OnApp: Competitive Pricing Review
• True Hybrid & Multi-Cloud White Paper
• Get Ready for Cloud Repatriation: Set up Your Multi-Cloud with OpenNebula
• Key Design Principles for Digital Transformation through Multi-Cloud

Community

🥰 Many thanks to those corporate users that have contributed in 2021 to our Case Study series…

• Ooma (California, US), the NYSE-listed consumer telecommunications company dedicated to empowering customers to be smart about their connectivity.
• Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the top university founded in 1425 and leading innovation in the European Higher Education sector.
• CEWE (Germany), the leading photo and online printing service company with 14 high-tech production sites and 27 sales offices across Europe.

👏 … and to our Partners for their engagement and support!

• Nimbus Cloud Services joined the OpenNebula MSP Program 
• FullStackS joined OpenNebula’s Service Partner Program and organized in September the Vienna DevOps Roundtable.
• We formalized a partnership agreement with Hivecell as part of the launch of their scalable big data, edge-as-a-service solution.
• We participated at the Enterprise Open Source Day organized by Factor Group.
• LINBIT announced the support for the new OpenNebula 6.0 by releasing LINSTOR-OpenNebula v.1.1.0
• Oracle, in collaboration with Rice University, developed a new open source cloud-bursting driver for OpenNebula to interact with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; read the full announcement by Alison Derbenwick, VP of Oracle for Research.

🔭 We’ve also been working hard during the year to incorporate additional open source products as new Virtual Appliances in our Public Marketplace:

• Kubernetes Virtual Appliance with bare-metal load balancer MetalLB.
• K3s appliance with Rancher self-registration
• GitLab CE 13.12.3
• AlmaLinux 8
• Rocky Linux 8
• openSUSE 15.3

💪 Despite the pandemic, we’ve been as active as possible in those Open Source and Edge Computing initiatives in which we participate, including:

• Formally joining LF Edge, the Linux Foundation’s umbrella organization working on edge computing.
• Supporting the CNCF’s Kubernetes on Edge Day virtual event as Gold Sponsors.
• Producing a really cool Webinar for the CNCF Community on how to use OpenNebula, Firecracker, K3s, and Agones for deploying multiplayer gaming infrastructure at the edge.
• Joining the Vodafone–AWS Business Edge Innovation Program after our successful pilot integration with AWS Wavelength using the Verizon 5G network in Boston (MA).

🇪🇺 And we have been playing a key role to consolidate a number of European strategic initiatives for Cloud and Edge Computing:

• In April we were invited by the European Commission to join the “Visionary Concepts” session at their Next-Gen IoT and Edge Computing Strategy Forum.
• We published our Manifesto for Europe’s Next-Generation Edge Cloud.
• The Eclipse Foundation invited us to publish a guest post on Edge Computing and Open Source in Europe.
• We are participating very actively in the IPCEI-CIS Project as a crucial open source meta-orchestration technology.
• We’ve been invited by the European Commission to join the new EU Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud.
• We’ve upgraded our commitment to the Gaia-X Project by supporting the latest Gaia-X Summit (Nov 18-19) as Platinum Sponsors.

Outreach

📡 Following the good experience we had with the new virtual format, in 2021 we’ve kept organizing instructive Webinars and TechDays along with our technology partners and local Community Champions:

• Webinar on LINBIT’s SDS solution
• Webinar on the new support for VMware vSphere 7
• Webinar on Multi-Cloud, with amazing presentations by Mike Azevedo (Lead Tech & Sales Engineer at Vultr) and Austin Black (Solutions Engineer at DigitalOcean).
• Presentation webinar for OpenNebula 6.0 “Mutara”
• A new edition of the TechDay Barcelona, featuring a full update on the Firecraker project by Diana-Maria Popa (SW Development Engineer at AWS).
• LINBIT OpenNebula TechDays, a 2-day virtual event full of really interesting talks.

🤖 And, of course, we’ve been participating in many open source and industry events, spreading the word about the benefits and amazing features of the new OpenNebula, including:

• The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit
• SUSECON 2021
• Edge Computing World Europe
• Open Source Infrastructure Conference
• FOSDEM 2021
• Open Source Experience Paris
• EGI Conference 2021 (in a panel with the Eclipse Foundation and the Norwegian research organization SINTEF).
• European Big Data Value Forum (in a panel with Intel and RISE, the Research Institutes of Sweden).
• DCD>Building the Edge (in a panel with Equinix, Nokia, and the Open Compute Project)
• DCD>España (in a panel with ABB, Cellnex Telecom, and PQC).
• OpenExpo Virtual Experience (in a panel on Gaia-X with Microsoft Azure, OVHcloud, and Tecnalia).
• Madrid Tech Show (with an amazing booth at the Cloud Expo Europe and sharing a panel discussion on Gaia-X with T-Systems, OVHcloud, and the Spanish innovation center ITI).
• As sponsors of the Cloud Expo Europe Frankfurt and joining the colocated HORIZON CLOUD Summit.

So, as you can see, 2021 has been quite a year for us… but we are sure 2022 will be even better! So, keep tuned for breaking news, including the release of the upcoming new version, OpenNebula 6.4, and the imminent launch of our new WHMCS integration… and don’t forget to pre-register for the OpenNebula Conference 2022! 🚀 Happy New Year and stay safe!

The OpenNebula Team