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Who do you think should win the 2025 Superuser Awards? The annual Superuser Awards are to recognize organizations that have used open infrastructure to improve their business while contributing back to the community.
This year, the Superuser Awards winner will be announced at the OpenInfra Summit Europe, October 17-19! Join us at the annual OpenInfra Summit for an opportunity to collaborate directly with the international community of people building and running open source infrastructure using Linux, StarlingX, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Kata Containers and 30+ other technologies. Get your Summit tickets now!
STACKIT IaaS team is one of the 3 nominees for the Superuser Awards 2025. Check out why its team is getting nominated:
Who is the nominee?
The STACKIT IaaS teams are part of the STACKIT Cloud. The teams provide compute, networking and storage services to run virtual machines (VMs) within STACKIT. Many of the team members are actively contributing to open source projects such as OpenStack, Yaook and OVS+OVN with new features, bug fixes or performance improvements.
How has open infrastructure transformed the organization’s business?
Open infrastructure forms the foundation of the STACKIT Cloud, enabling rapid time-to-market. This allowed for swift customer onboarding and valuable early insights. The inherent openness proved crucial in adapting to evolving customer demands. Unlike rigid proprietary systems, open infrastructure offered the flexibility to make rapid changes, optimizing services and tailoring them to customer needs. This agility ensures the STACKIT Cloud remains customer-centric in a dynamic market. The ability to iterate and innovate based on direct customer feedback has been a cornerstone of our development, allowing continuous enhancement and a competitive edge.
How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open source project?
Since 2018, STACKIT Cloud has been deeply committed to the open-source community. Our involvement started from a need to fix operational issues, initially contributing bug fixes to OpenStack and its underlying components. We have also started taking part in upstream communities, like the Large-Scale SIG.
Our contributions have grown beyond bug resolution to include feature development, particularly in layers below OpenStack. For example, we’re actively involved with OVN.
In addition we have created YAOOK, a Lifecycle-Management for OpenStack on Kubernetes and made it open source.
What open source technologies does the organization use in its open infrastructure environment?
STACKIT Cloud’s backend uses open-source solutions, with OpenStack as its core IaaS layer for managing customer resources. Networking relies on OVN and OVS for stable, scalable infrastructure, enabling virtual routing and firewalling. Yaook, an OpenStack lifecycle management system built on Kubernetes, manages the entire environment, providing automated deployment, scaling, and operational efficiency, ensuring a secure and performant cloud platform.
What is the scale of your open infrastructure environment?
We are running multiple larger OpenStack clusters across 2 Regions. In total they run roughly 2000 hypervisors with 250.000 cores and 2PB of RAM. In these OpenStack Clusters we run around 40.000 VMs. Our OpenStack APIs serve 2 million Requests per hour.
What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?
When starting with OpenStack our biggest challenges revolve around the neutron agent network scaling. We overcame this challenge during our Queens-to-Yoga migration by switching to OVN as a network backend. While this is not without challenges as well, these issues have been largely solved by now.
In the recent past most of our challenges have been linked to scaling the environment beyond the limits of current deployments. We are experimenting with new and exciting ways to scale beyond and deliver our customers with a reliable, stable and scalable infrastructure. Thereby we want to solve the issue of having multiple OpenStack Clusters in a Region which currently leads to resource partitioning.
How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?
STACKIT’s IaaS teams prioritize innovation, efficiency, and reliability, actively engaging with the Open Source community. They collaborate with other participants in Open Source projects to develop shared features addressing common needs. A prime example is the joint development of BGP support for OVN with the OVN community, driven by mutual interest. Open infrastructure facilitates this collaborative innovation, providing a framework for pursuing new features with community members. This removes organizational hurdles, fostering shared ownership, accelerating development, and leading to robust solutions. STACKIT fully leverages this advantage of seamless collaboration with diverse contributors, unencumbered by traditional boundaries.
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