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Since 2016, VEXXHOST has played a pivotal role in supporting the OpenDev team, providing essential infrastructure that powers much of the OpenStack community’s development and CI systems. What began as an early collaboration with the OpenStack Infrastructure team has grown into a nearly decade-long partnership built on shared goals, technical innovation, and mutual benefit.
Behind the Scenes: How VEXXHOST’s Infrastructure Accelerates Open Source Infrastructure Software Development.
At the heart of this collaboration is the unique and substantial resource donation VEXXHOST provides to OpenDev. Today, VEXXHOST hosts both critical control plane services and specialized CI test environments that support the OpenDev ecosystem. These resources are not just generous, they are essential.
- For control plane services, VEXXHOST provides infrastructure for demanding workloads like Gerrit (code review), Gitea (Git hosting), and DNS. These services are at the core of OpenDev’s operations, and they require a hosting environment that is both powerful and stable. Gerrit, for example, is known for its heavy resource requirements (high memory, significant CPU, and fast disk storage). VEXXHOST’s ability to meet these demands effortlessly has made them the natural home for this essential service. Unlike many clouds where allocating such high-resource VMs can be a challenge, VEXXHOST has consistently delivered the performance needed to keep OpenDev’s services running smoothly.
- VEXXHOST also provides GPU-enabled instances, something no other provider in the OpenDev ecosystem currently offers, as well as other specialized compute resources for CI (continuous integration) jobs, including high-memory VMs and nodes capable of nested virtualization. The availability of GPU hardware is particularly notable: it enables OpenDev to support modern workloads like machine learning model testing or high-performance compute benchmarking within the CI system. This opens up a whole new class of test scenarios that are increasingly relevant as OpenStack and adjacent projects expand into AI and HPC.
- The robust CI pipelines that OpenStack depends on are, in part, built on VEXXHOST infrastructure. This creates a virtuous cycle: the resources provided by VEXXHOST allow OpenStack developers to test and verify updates across a range of environments, ensuring that when VEXXHOST deploys those same updates, they “just work.” In this sense, OpenDev acts as a real-time canary for OpenStack updates, flagging issues early and feeding them back to developers and operators alike.
- When resource demands shift or special requests are made, the VEXXHOST team has been able to adapt quickly—whether by slicing newer hardware into modern flavor configurations or granting access to specific types of infrastructure. This adaptability has made OpenDev’s environment more resilient and more capable of experimentation, which in turn benefits the broader community.
Real-Time Collaboration: How OpenDev Serves as a Live Benchmark for VEXXHOST Infrastructure
The relationship is far from one-sided. For VEXXHOST, the collaboration has delivered concrete benefits. Hosting OpenDev services gives the VEXXHOST team real-time insight into the performance and behavior of their infrastructure under sustained and diverse workloads. In many ways, OpenDev “benchmarks” their environment daily. The feedback loop between OpenDev users and VEXXHOST engineers has allowed the latter to identify and fix issues rapidly, whether networking glitches or Ceph-related storage concerns, ultimately improving the stability of their commercial cloud offerings.
Moreover, VEXXHOST’s involvement with OpenDev has deepened its community engagement. Team members have participated in keynotes and technical sessions at multiple OpenInfra Summits where they’ve shared lessons learned and helped push the conversation around open infrastructure forward.
VEXXHOST also hosts its own projects on OpenDev, leveraging tools like Zuul and Gerrit. For other organizations evaluating OpenDev’s services, VEXXHOST’s advice is clear: embrace the ecosystem, engage with the community, and be ready to learn from and contribute to the continuous improvement of the tools you depend on.
Perhaps most impressively, VEXXHOST has maintained one of the most up-to-date OpenStack deployments in the ecosystem. Their ability to keep pace with upstream releases is a testament to the strength of their engineering team, but it’s also an outcome of their close integration with OpenDev. Because they support the very CI systems that validate OpenStack’s codebase, they benefit from early insight into potential issues and emerging features.
Better Together: How Open Collaboration Strengthens Open Source Communities & Products
As the open infrastructure landscape continues to evolve—driven by demands from AI, edge computing, and high-performance workloads, the VEXXHOST and OpenDev partnership stands out as a model for collaboration. It proves that when cloud providers and open source communities work closely together, they can build ecosystems that are not only robust and performant, but also deeply aligned with the needs of developers and users alike.
