Guest: Allison Price (LinkedIn)
Foundation: OpenInfra Foundation (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

The OpenInfra Summit entered its third year in Vancouver, aiming to bring together its communities for an action-packed event. With numerous keynotes, demos, and meaningful discussions around the OpenInfra projects, this year OpenInfra welcomed more new faces than ever before.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya talks to Allison Price, VP of Marketing and Community at the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation), to talk about their latest event. She goes into detail about some of the key topics that were featured and their latest announcements. Price also talks about the communities behind OpenInfra and OpenStack and how they are working together. 

Highlights of this video interview:

• Price recaps on the latest OpenInfra Foundation in Vancouver, which this year comprised 50% new attendees. Price explains that there was a good mixture between old and new faces and her experience of seeing meaningful discussions around the OpenInfra projects. 
• Some of the key points around the show were how ubiquitous open source has become and the prevalence of open infrastructure. AI remains a hot topic and how open-source technology can be used to deploy AI workloads. Price talks about some of the demos they had at the event and how the OpenInfra community is shaping what AI looks like. 
• As technologies mature, the spotlight tends to gravitate towards newer technologies.  Price explains that there is still a lot of momentum behind OpenStack, telling us about some notable use cases. She tells us that last year they had over 40 million cores in production, with users of all sizes. 
• Awards were an important part of the summit, and Price goes into detail about the super users who are using the software within their organization but also contributing back to the community. She talks about this year’s winner, Bloomberg. 
• Diversity and inclusion play an integral role in the OpenInfra and OpenStack communities. Price explains how they create a welcoming, inclusive environment telling us that they partnered with KaOS to review all their diversity and inclusion practices for the summit. She talks about some of the more recent practices they have put in place. 
• OpenInfra had two big announcements: launching two regional hubs, one in Europe and the other in Asia to help with the adoption and commercialization of the software they are building together. They also announced a new Gold Member from South Korea, Okestro.  
• Price discusses the reasons behind the new regional hubs such as for funding reasons and enabling more people to participate because of cost and lowering the barriers of entry. 
• OpenInfra is still working on its event strategy for the new regional hubs to see what will work best for them and make the most sense for those regions. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.